Managing Doubt

Remember, I wrote to a student recently:

You don't have to banish doubt from your mind when you are reporting and writing. You are learning to listen. You are learning to gather stories and then re-tell those stories in an artful, accurate and meaningful way.

You just need to show up physically, including doubts that are in your mind. Reading will help. Buying the recorder will help.

But also, as Don Murray reminds us, writing to discover what you want to uncover also helps. Writing down your questions now helps. Writing what stories you think you might discover.

Melvin Mencher talks about the importance of having and writing down a working hypothesis that is flexible and open to the evidence--stories, statistics, elements of five senses, conversations, etc.--you will gather.

Writing down your doubts helps now, rather than letting them bounce around in your head and grow larger. That is why you have a blog--to write. To take a few more minutes and write them down. Another label for this day's blog might be "the path to discovery."

Every writer, reporter, story gatherer has doubts. I just watched last night the movie DOUBT. Meryl Streep's character at the end displays a beautifully intense attack of doubt.

A friend of mine who once was my bureau chief in Providence and then later became associate managing editor used to say that he felt those butterflies of anxiety UNTIL he got "a few quotes under his belt."

In your case I want you to be paying attention to not just the "quotes" but any dialogue that occurs and of course, the story. But those butterflies are also telling you about things you need to pay attention to--about yourself and about the story.
BH

Diane Arbus as a Revelator

Here is part of the Guggenheim application statement by photographer Diane Arbus in 1963. I saw a phenomenal Arbus exhibit in New York in March 2005. The book DIANE ARBUS REVELATIONS represents some of the images in that show.

The show included a space in the museum that replicated her darkroom with her books and a photographic enlarger that allowed you to see with a safe-light how an negative image appeared when she was printing it.

What Arbus wanted to explore reminded me of some of the ideas might pursue this.

May her work and the work of others such as her inspire you to achieve your wildest dreams.

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1963

Plan for a Photographic Project

American Rites, Manners and Customs

I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present because we tend while living here and now to perceive only what is random and barren and formless about it. While we regret that the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future, its innumerable inscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning. I want to gather them, like somebody’s grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.

There are the Ceremonies of Celebration (the Pageants, the Festivals, the Feasts, the Conventions) and the Ceremonies of Competition (Contests, Games, Sports), the Ceremonies of Buying and Selling, of Gambling, of the Law and the Show; the Ceremonies of Fame in which the Winners Win and the Lucky are Chosen or Family Ceremonies or Gatherings (the Schools, the Clubs the Meetings). Then there are the Ceremonial Places (The Beauty Parlor, The Funeral Parlor or, simply the Parlor) and Ceremonial Costumes (what Waitresses wear, or Wrestlers), Ceremonies of the Rich, like the Dog Show, and of the Middle Class, like the Bridge Game. Or, for example: the Dancing Lesson, the Graduation, the Testimonial Dinner, the Séance, the Gymnasium and the Picnic. And perhaps the Waiting Room, the Factory, the Masquerade, the Rehearsal, the Initiation, the Hotel Lobby and the Birthday Party. The etcetera.

I will write whatever is necessary for the further description and elucidation of these Rites and I will go wherever I can to find them.

These are our symptoms and our monuments. I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary.
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BH

Susan Sontag on reading and writing

In the Dec. 22 & 29, 2008 NEW YORKER, Darryl Pinckney writes about Susan Sontag's early journals. I loved reading about her lists of books she was reading in the early 1960s and her critiques of the writers. Henry James, Proust. Tillich, Gibbon, G. Le Bras, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Sherwood Anderson, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison & Grace Paley.

Pickney concludes the article with a quote from a 1961 journal entry:

"Writing is a beautiful act. It is making something that will give pleasure to others later."

What are you reading now?

What are you writing now?

BH