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Follow the Story: How to Write Successful Nonfiction (Paperback)
by James B. Stewart
| Category:
Writing, Nonfiction, Narrative writing, Writing skills |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
MSL price:
¥ 138.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Containing helpful chapters on properly formatting dialogue and laying out plot and developing structure, this book highlights steps to take to make concrete improvements in your own writing. |
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Author: James B. Stewart
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pub. in: October, 1998
ISBN: 0684850672
Pages: 384
Measurements: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA14014
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0684850672
(Pre-ordered item by customer)
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- Awards & Credential -
The author is the Pulitzer Prize-winner and the author for the New York Times Bestseller Den of Thieves. |
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- MSL Picks -
Mr. Stewart is a wonderful writer and a great teacher. I was looking for a book to send my friend who is a journalism professor at the University of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. I have had a hard time finding journalism text books for my friend. I picked up Mr. Stewart's book and he explains that journalism is not and cannot be taught from text books. To be a good journalist, you simply have to learn to write well. His journalism classes at Columbia are writing classes. He tells his students to practice their writing skills, do research for factual content, learn techniques from fiction writing to dramatize the story. He takes you inside a few stories and novels he has written, tells you how to put a personal anchor in a story to hook the reader, how to demonstrate warmth, humanity and drama even in a technical subject, how to write a story and how to read a story. He sure has mastered the art of making stories interesting. That's why he was a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, great editor at the Wall Street Journal and that's why this book is such a good read. I can't recommend this book enough to everyone, whether writing students, journalism students, teachers or just plain people who like to read.
(From quoting a guest reviewer)
Target readers:
Nonfiction students.
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- Better with -
Better with
How to Read a Book (A Touchstone Book) (Paperback)
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James B. Stewart is the author of Blood Sport and Den of Thieves. A former editor of The Wall Street Journal, Stewart won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his reporting on the stock market crash and insider trading. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Smart Money.
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From Publisher
In Follow the Story, bestselling author and journalist James B. Stewart teaches you the techniques of compelling narrative writing.
It is the indispensable guide to writing successful nonfiction books, articles, feature stories, or memoirs. Stewart provides concrete directions for conceiving, reporting, structuring, and writing nonfiction - techniques that he has used in his own successful books and stories. By using examples from his own work, Stewart illustrates systematically a way of thinking about and executing stories, a method that has helped numerous reporters and Columbia students become better writers.
Follow the Story examines in detail:
- How an idea is conceived
- How to "sell" ideas to editors and publishers
- How to report the nonfiction story
- Six models that can be used for any nonfiction story
- How to structure the narrative story
- How to write introductions, endings, dialogue, and description
- How to introduce and develop characters
- How to use literary devices
- Pitfalls to avoid
Learn from this book a clear way of looking at the world with the alert curiosity that is the first indispensable step toward good writing.
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Chapter 1
CURIOSITY
We seem to be living in an age of know-it-alls: talk show hosts and guests, expert witnesses, pundits, gurus on every conceivable subject. The information age is exhausting. It is also dull, like a dinner party guest who never stops talking. In my view, this climate is anathema to good writing, which is rooted not in knowledge, but in curiosity.
This may seem paradoxical, since one of the primary goals of nonfiction writing is to inform. But I strongly believe that good writing begins in the mind, long before pen touches paper, or fingers a keyboard. Writers must learn to think like writers. I find this is a point I need to stress over and over again with my students. For thinking like a writer turns out to be a very radical change from what most of us have been taught and conditioned to do over our entire lifetimes. At first it feels very uncomfortable. In some ways it reminds me of learning to speak a foreign language. Conversation in the language requires intense concentration. It's such a relief to lapse back into English, which flows effortlessly in the mind and over the tongue. But as the grammar and vocabulary of the new language become familiar, conversation becomes easier. If one is immersed in a foreign culture for long enough, speaking its language becomes almost second nature. For most people, thinking like a writer is not nearly so difficult as learning a foreign language, but it requires effort, concentration, and discipline. It's a relief to revert to our usual patterns of thought. Over time, thinking like a writer becomes almost unconscious. In a few cases I've seen it all but transform someone's personality. For a desirable side effect of thinking like a writer is that it makes you more interesting to others. It enhances one's appreciation of life.
The essence of thinking like a writer is the recognition that what's most interesting is what's unknown, not what is known. Thinking like a writer prizes the question more than the answer. It celebrates paradox, mystery, and uncertainty, recognizing that all of them contain the seeds of a potential story.
At first encounter, it is probably hard to recognize how radical a notion this is. But consider: in ways large and small, subtle and unsubtle, overt and hidden, we are rewarded from childhood on for providing answers to questions posed by others. We are taught to process information by memorizing and retaining it, not by questioning it. Confronted daily by a mass of new information. we rarely stop to consider what is missing.
So many people seem to spend their lives in the inevitably futile quest for certainty. Often this takes the form of religion, which for many provides solace in the face of the unknown and the unknowable. But what may be entirely appropriate in the spiritual realm too often spills over into every other aspect of life. Patients expect certainty from their doctors; clients demand clear-cut answers from their lawyers; and voters want solutions from their politicians, however intractable the problems and farfetched the proposed remedies. While managers may pay lip service to the notion that they welcome criticism and questions from their employees, the reality seems to be that they prize flattery and a parroting back of their own ideas. The more powerful they are, the more insulated they seem by yes-people. Questioners, by and large, are viewed as dissidents, heretics, and malcontents. It seems that the more we are confronted by change, the more we cling to the status quo.
No wonder the unanswered question prompts such a visceral reaction. Some people seem to panic, others suffer anxiety attacks, and most people feel uncomfortable. To varying degrees, all of us react this way. But instead of repressing or fleeing from such feelings, writers need to embrace them and explore their causes. They are important clues. All of them can be harnessed by the writer to make people want to read his or her work. For the fundamental paradox of the unknown is that even as most people flee from it in their own lives, they are fascinated by it. Even though people spend much of their time reading things that do nothing but reinforce what they already know and believe, curiosity remains irrepressible in the human spirit.
In my view, curiosity is the great quality that binds writers to readers. Curiosity. sends writers on their quests, and curiosity is what makes readers read the stories that result. These days, when there is increasing competition for people's time, writers cannot count on anyone to read their work out of a sense of obligation, moral duty, or abstract dedication to "being informed." They will not read because someone else deems a subject to be important. They will read because they want to, and they will want to because they are curious.
While editing the front page of the Journal - a newspaper with as educated, affluent, and sophisticated a readership as any writer could hope for - I had to confront and accept the fact that the average reader isn't interested in much of anything outside his immediate self-interest. This is, of course, an exaggeration. Any given individual is interested in something; some people are interested in many things. But the odds that someone shares those interests with anyone else, let alone with all of the two million people who subscribed to the Journal seem quite remote. The Journal conducted periodic reader surveys to determine what, in fact, people said they were interested in. A large portion, something in the neighborhood of 70 percent, indicated an interest in national macroeconomic data and trends, which isn't surprising given the makeup of the Journal's readership. The next-highest-ranking topic, but garnering less than 50 percent interest, was local business news, obviously of interest only to those in the same locality. Nothing else - not national political news, foreign news, legal affairs, religion, or editorial opinion - registered even a one-third interest level. And in surveys that revealed what Journal readers actually read, it was clear that when these broad topics were reduced to specific stories - say, oil production in Libya - there was no measurable interest at all. I never had the heart to tell some reporters that these surveys suggested that no one had read their published stories.
There are, of course, prominent exceptions to this general level of lack of interest. During one week when such a survey was conducted, the front page ran an obituary of Sam Walton, the legendary billionaire founder of Wal-Mart Stores. As I recall, that story attracted an astoundingly high 80 percent readership, even though there was nothing particularly surprising or newsworthy in it. But during that same week in 1991, a group of dissident Communists attempted a coup in the Soviet Union, kidnapping Mikhail Gorbachev and trying to reinstate the repressive militaristic regime that had so long threatened the West. I couldn't imagine a much more dramatic or important story. The characters - Gorbachev, a heroic Boris Yeltsin, the vodkasaturated dissidents - were great; the action and intrigue was out of a Le Carré novel; and the day-to-day suspense was intense. Our Moscow correspondent, Peter Gumbel, handed in the best work of his career, and the front-page staff worked night after night to perfect it. As I recall, the largest readership achieved by any of those stories was a meager 36 percent.
These results were of less concern to the paper as a whole than they were to me as the front-page editor. On any given day, there was a broad enough range of news that something in the paper appealed to just about everyone in the Journal's constituency. But the front page carried only three stories a day, stories that received dramatic display, took up a lot of space, and demanded a far greater commitment of time from readers. On average, only about 17 percent of the readers were reading these stories in their entirety, which meant that 83 percent were not interested enough to bother. Although these same studies showed a high level of satisfaction with the front page - a sign that sooner or later readers found something that interested them - I thought we could do much better. For from the point of view of the reporter and writer, who might write only a handful of front-page stories in the course of a year, I found the surveys dismaying. I myself didn't want to write a story that would be read by only 17 percent of the paper's readers. |
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Anieta Carlson (MSL quote), USA
<2008-05-14 00:00>
James B. Stewart appears to be in love with himself. But weed out the self-glorifying comments. Harvest the tips, ideas and fruit and you'll find a helpful a step-by-step plan for writing an interesting feature story.
The six page introduction has between 90 and 100 references to himself. He explains why he is qualified to write this book and walks the reader through the events in his life that led him to become a writer. He was the editor of the Wall Street front page.
Nearly every illustration in the book is from his work. The 60 page appendix is three stories that he wrote. His most frequent statement thoughout the book is, "In my opinion" or a variation of that. I can see my high school English teacher cringing and shouting, "Who else's opinion would it be?"
But skim the book with a highlighter. Marking the sections that are instructional, the step-by-step writing processes. Of the 300 actual book pages (excluding the appendix), you'll be left with about half the book. Read them carefully. If you're looking for a good instructional feature writing book, what's left is worth the effort.
Stewart begins the writing process with curiosity. He then shows how to turn that curiosity into idea hunting. He teaches how to gather information, form a lead, and decide on and follow a structure. According to Stewart, the type of question the story is answering tells the author what lead, structure and ending to use. Possible types of questions: What's going on? What are others are doing? What is a certain person really like? How could that have happened? How should I feel? What should my reaction be? What caused such-and-such? What happened? Each of those questions suggests a different story type and requires a different kind of structure and response. Once an author knows the question, the story writing process is basically determined and the author knows how to proceed. This practical guide for feature writing is a very practical guide for the author asking "How?".
I would have rather read a book already edited into just the practical information and a variety of examples (skipping the self glorification). But I haven't found one yet. |
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