Artful Journalism: Essays in the Craft and Magic of True Storytelling

By Walt Harrington

“If you aspire to do artful journalism, everything you need to know is in this book.”—Jon Franklin, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, journalism professor emeritus, University of Maryland, author of Writing for Story

Artful Journalism is a must-read for journalism professors and students, working professionals who want to enhance their storytelling skills, readers, and literary journalism scholars who understand the immutable place of “truth” in even the most artful examples of journalism.

For four decades, Walt Harrington has done memorable stories and books that are still studied and admired by those who pursue the kind of journalism that aims to engage the heart as well as the mind. A longtime Washington Post Magazine writer who became a journalism professor at the University of Illinois, Harrington has been a leading voice in the field of long-form storytelling. Artful Journalism collects for the first time his insightful and evocative essays that have inspired and informed several generations of writers who aspire to do journalism-- that captures the feeling of literature while adhering to traditional journalistic standards of fairness, balance, and accuracy.

Artful Journalism also includes essays by two of America’s prominent young journalists, Wright Thompson and Justin Heckert, whose work has been inspired and shaped by Harrington’s principles.

“For years, I've been marveling at Walt Harrington's work and wondering how he did it. After reading Artful Journalism, I have my answer. Not only is Walt a brilliant writer, he's a true master of the craft.”—David Finkel, Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Award winner, author of The Good Soldiers

“Harrington’s essays are as practical as they are artful. He reminds us why we write, and why it matters.”—Joe Mackall, director, Ashland University creative writing program, author of Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Sager Group
• Release date: Jun 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9780996490122

Book preview

Praise for Artful Journalism

"Good writers bring us inside ordinary life and allow us to share those lives. This is not easy. Walt Harrington in Artful Journalism reveals a career’s worth of lessons on how to do it and why literary journalism itself matters."

Norman Sims, president, International Association for Literary Journalism Studies; journalism professor emeritus, University of Massachusetts

"Walt Harrington’s body of work is indeed artful, a word I do not use lightly for nonfiction. And these essays about doing that artful work are, most of all, wise. If you’ve ever yearned to have a mentor in your own life as a journalist, then there is no one more supportive and knowledgeable and inspiring than Harrington, and these essays are like a series of splendid conversations with him—only better, because you can return to them over and over again."

Samuel G. Freedman, journalism professor, Columbia University; author of Letters to a Young Journalist

"Can a book about writing be a page turner? Definitely—if the writer is Walt Harrington. The essays collected in Artful Journalism make you want to keep reading. Even better, they make you want to write."

Leslie Rubinkowski, director, Goucher College’s MFA program in creative nonfiction; author of Impersonating Elvis

"I can’t think of a better person to teach a new generation of reporters and writers how to do nonfiction the right way than Walt Harrington. Artful Journalism doesn’t just give young reporters the basics for doing narrative journalism. It inspires story ideas and stirs passion to do this kind of work. You can’t read this book without constantly thinking about the stories you could and should be reporting."

Matt Tullis, journalism professor, Ashland University; host of Gangrey: The Podcast

There are few greater mentors than Walt Harrington, which is why I think this book is such a valuable addition to every journalist’s tool box.

Wright Thompson, senior writer, ESPN The Magazine; National Magazine Award finalist

"For years, I’ve been marveling at Walt Harrington’s work and wondering how he did it. After reading Artful Journalism, I have my answer. Not only is Walt a brilliant writer, he’s a true master of the craft."

David Finkel, Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Award winner; author of The Good Soldiers

If you aspire to do artful journalism, everything you need to know is in this book.

Jon Franklin, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner; journalism professor emeritus, University of Maryland; author of Writing for Story

"Walt Harrington’s Artful Journalism needs to be read by every student eager to write, every journalist longing for more, every essayist exploring what’s possible in nonfiction, and every memoirist searching for meaning. Harrington’s essays are as practical as they are artful. He reminds us why we write, and why it matters."

Joe Mackall, director, Ashland University’s creative writing program; author of Plain Secrets: An Outsider Among the Amish

Praise for Walt Harrington

A compelling and important book... It’s been a long time since I have read anything as moving, and inspiring, as the passages about the relationship between Harrington and his father.

—The Washington Post on The Everlasting Stream

This beautifully written book is about life’s true values... Read it and count your blessings.

—President George H. W. Bush on The Everlasting Stream

A message in a bottle floated out to white America about black America’s remarkable diversity and resilience.

—New York Newsday on Crossings

Mr. Harrington adds the skill of an engaged reporter, a personal stake in his subject and the ability to find fresh voices to talk openly about themselves and multi-racialism.

—The New York Times on Crossings

Walt Harrington’s other books

The Everlasting Stream: A True Story of Rabbits, Guns, Friendship, and Family

Crossings: A White Man’s Journey into Black America

American Profiles

At the Heart of It

Intimate Journalism

The Beholder’s Eye

Next Wave

Slices of Life

Acts of Creation: America’s Finest Hand Craftsmen at Work

To all the people who let us write about them

Artful Journalism: Essays in the Craft and Magic of True Storytelling

Walt Harrington

Copyright © 2015 by Walt Harrington

See Permissions page for further credits.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published in the United States of America.

Cover Designed by: Stravinski Pierre and Siori Kitajima, SF AppWorks LLC

http://www.sfappworks.com

Formatting by Siori Kitajima and Ovidiu Vlad for SF AppWorks LLC

E-Book Formatted by Ovidiu Vlad

Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9964901-2-2

ISBN-10: 0996490124

Published by The Sager Group LLC

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Contents

Praise for Artful Journalism

Praise for Walt Harrington

Walt Harrington’s other books

Foreword: By Wright Thompson

Prologue: Be That It Made Some Contribution

One: Writing to Feel Alive

Two: The Writer’s Choice: Keeping the Non in Nonfiction

Three: On Profile Writing

Four: On Profile Writing, II

Five: Intimate Journalism

Six: Intimate Journalism, II

Seven: Attending to Detail, Striving for Meaning

Eight: The Journalist’s Haiku

Nine: Journalist Is an Honest Word

Ten: When Writing About Yourself Is Still Journalism

Eleven: How Memories Become Memoirs

Twelve: Letter to a Young Reporter

Thirteen: The New Masters

Fourteen: What Journalists Can Teach Ethnographers

Afterword: By Justin Heckert

Acknowledgments

About the contributors

About the author

About the publisher

Foreword

A Great Lasting Story Is about Everyone

By Wright Thompson

As an imitator and acolyte of Walt Harrington, and now as a friend, I keep his example and advice about intimate journalism close to my heart at almost every step of doing my job. The stories I write, and the stories my friends and colleagues write—which are now called longform journalism, although a new term will certainly arise to replace that—are our attempts to do the things our mentors did before us. There are few greater mentors than Walt Harrington, which is why I think this book is such a valuable addition to every journalist’s tool box.

I first heard Walt’s name whispered, as if he were a kind of Yoda figure so mysterious that I was disoriented when I finally met him, shocked that he might actually be a real person. He had edited a collection of stories titled Intimate Journalism: The Art and Craft of Reporting Everyday Life that served as bible and roadmap for my friends and me at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. It sparked our interest in such stories, showed us what to aim for, and even how to get there. It remains the single most important textbook I’ve ever read in my life, and one that I still turn to when I need inspiration or help, when I’m stuck or bored. Artful Journalism will serve the same purpose.

Artful is an interesting word to describe what Walt has long done and preached, and a perfect description. The ultimate goal of a longform journalism story is for it to read with the smoothness and drive of a short story. Every part of that description is of equal importance—the use of character and scene and place familiar in works of fiction, and, of course, the requirement that the story be completely true. The odd modern trend of memoir as being an approximation of the truth is both a blasphemy against all the great work that’s been done in the past and a view that seems certain to erode the reader’s trust in the kind of stories to which Walt has dedicated his professional life. The Gospel According to Harrington: be a dogged, blisteringly persistent, accurate reporter. There’s a famous anecdote about Walt taking a thermometer to check the water temperature of a woodland stream for a story he was doing about hunting, and it is not apocryphal. It is his reporting and writing technique and philosophy reduced to a single action: be creative but make sure the picture you are painting is unflinchingly true.

I did a story a while back about Michael Jordan, the retired basketball player, and the story ended with him in bed falling asleep while watching the Clint Eastwood movie, The Unforgiven. I wasn’t in bed with him. From my reporting, I knew he watched westerns every night, and that watching westerns was a way he communed with his dead father, and that one of his favorite movies they had watched together had been The Unforgiven. So late one night, while leaving Michael’s condo in Charlotte, I told him he had homework: I wanted him to tell me the next day what movie he’d turned on to go to sleep. The following morning, I saw him in an elevator and said, Well, what did you watch? (That isn’t in quotes because I don’t remember exactly what I said.) He told me. Making sure he wasn’t helping me create the perfect anecdote to tie up my story, I went and found the television schedules for that night, checked, and discovered that Michael had, in fact, been telling the truth. All of that—from asking the question to rigorously trying to poke a hole in my own narrative as a means of honoring the trust placed in me by the reader—flows straight from Walt. This book is full of such insights and actionable advice that will immediately make an impact on how well you report and write your stories.

Yet there’s something else in here, too, something more important than his tips and advice on craft and honesty. He gets at the underlying philosophy of what we do—the idea that, as narrative journalists, we have a vital and important task to write about, in the words of Walt, somebodies and nobodies who matter—from a future president of the United States to parents dealing with the cost of a child’s suicide. We write about the human condition, about how people make sense of the obstacles they encounter in their lives. I often think about a favorite quote from novelist John Steinbeck as I begin to find and report a new story. It comes from his masterpiece, East of Eden: If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen... A great lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting—only the deeply personal and familiar.

That’s at the heart of Walt Harrington’s artful journalism and his teachings about artful journalism. Don’t find the freak show—the one-legged marathon runner, to pick a trope common in beginning sportswriting—but instead find the universal humanity of the people and places you explore in your work. These true short stories we all love only succeed if they are about more than just the story on the page. They become artful when they are stories about everyone.

Prologue

Be That It Made Some Contribution

I knew an old man who had been a country preacher for more than half a century. In his last days, he would sit in his room at his daughter’s house, where he had come after his health was gone, and listen to aging and scratchy recordings of sermons he’d given as a young man. He had been a powerful preacher, with a chest-rumbling voice that sang and whispered and bellowed all at once. As he listened, he put a handkerchief to his face, and cried.

Be that it made some contribution, he said softly.

I suppose that’s all any of us can hope for. Did we raise children who were strong and healthy? Build houses that lasted? Sing songs that inspired? Fight crime well? Teach children to read better? Save someone from cancer, depression, suicide? Bring someone joy or wisdom or empathy? Do something, anything that is remembered or, if not remembered, at least passed on without credit or notice in the lives of others for some good?

Forty years sound like a long time but they are lived in a flash. That’s how long I’ve been doing journalism, writing about doing journalism, and teaching journalism. Looking back, I think I was pretty well destined to be a journalist. In graduate school, when I decided that a career in academic sociology was not for me, I asked myself: What am I good at?

I answered, I complain.

Well, who in the world is going to pay me to complain? I thought.

Then I knew: I’ll be a journalist!

They make livings as rebels and iconoclasts, I believed, rather naively. But it worked out, and I can’t image what else my temperament would have suited me to do. A friend in college once said, Harrington would rather curse the darkness than light a single candle. A bit harsh but a bit true in my early days. Years later, my wife would tell friends that it was a good thing I had discovered journalism because otherwise I’d be making change at a tollbooth kiosk. A man whose favorite movie characters were played by Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces and John Wayne in Stagecoach is just not built for respectable occupations. Fortunately for me, journalism was becoming respectable right when I was coming along.

At first, my interest in deep human reporting was out of whack with the zeitgeist. USA Today, with its flashy graphics and bit-sized stories, was a few years from launch, and the ideas it would embody were already in the ether. When I submitted my journalism portfolio for review by my journalism master’s degree faculty committee, a professor told me my work was promising but that nobody was going to be doing such stories anymore. Stories would be limited to fourteen inches or so, and nothing would jump from the front page to the inside of newspapers because people were just too busy to read. They now wanted something called information.

Nobody’s going to hire you, he said with professorial certainty.

Well, the future hides in a murky crystal ball. Along came the narrative journalism movement in the late 1970s and, suddenly, my interest and passion were downright fashionable. The movement continued into the early twenty-first century when the Internet—and journalism’s fear that its arrival was going to destroy newspapers and magazines—sucked the air out of our room. Deep human reporting didn’t disappear but it has, for more than a decade now, taken a rumble seat as journalism’s masters have flailed about trying to decipher the Web. I’ve pretty much ignored the matter, as I ignored my professor’s advice decades ago. I wasn’t interested in news bits, flashy graphics, or information then, and I’m not now.

I once spent a day with African American filmmaker Charles Burnett, who had just won a MacArthur Genius Award. It was the early nineties, and black filmmakers like Burnett and the more famous Spike Lee were on the rise. I asked Burnett if he ever worried that the public interest in serious black-themed movies was a temporary blip and that the films and their directors would soon go again into eclipse. I don’t care one way or the other, he said. I can only do what I can do. Since then, Burnett has made a score of feature films, documentaries, TV shows, and won a batch of awards—and you’ve never heard of him. He got his wish: the New York Times has called him the nation’s least-known great filmmaker. As journalism changed, I reminded myself of Charles Burnett’s words many times.

I don’t care one way or the other. I can only do what I can do.

I’m an accidental essayist. I only wrote essays about doing journalism to introduce book collections of my own stories, to teach feature writing at the Washington Post, to help spread the word among journalists about how satisfying and valuable it is to do deep human reporting. I always thought these essays were the toss-off work of my career. It was my own stories that I wanted people to notice and applaud. But a funny thing happened. Over the years, I began to hear from journalism colleagues around the country, journalism college students, and professors who were not praising my own stories but my essays about how I did my own stories.

What’s the old saying? If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.

Like others prone to workaholism, I gave up a lot for my life’s passion—many weeks away from home, missed birthdays, long hours working, many more hours distracted by thinking about the work. My young wife once left two full trash bags blocking my way out the front door so I would remember to put them on the street. I came home that night and she was livid that I had left them. Honestly, I told her, I hadn’t noticed them. I must have stepped over the bags while I was thinking about the work. It took her years to realize I was telling the truth. She once came home from work and heard me alone in my study talking out loud: Whoa! What a great line! I was talking about a line I had written. Needless to say I was embarrassed.

When you put so much into your work, you want it to matter.

Be that it made some contribution.

But, in the end, you can only do what you can do.

Everybody else decides if it mattered.

One

Writing to Feel Alive

One writes in order to feel: that is the fundamental mover.

—Rita Dove, The Poet’s World

Journalists are always talking about how they write to inform the public, to defend democracy, to champion the little guy against the corporate mogul, to create a better world. I began my career decades ago holding these high-minded rationales. But over the years, as I turned to writing about the everyday lives of people, it dawned on