Yesterday
I emailed to Santa Clara University a 600-word article I wrote based on an
interview with a finance professor who has been researching why central banks
in developing nations have been accumulating a high level of international
reserves (a catchall term for foreign currency and other financial instruments
with broad global liquidity). Today I email them the invoice. It’s what I do
for a living.
If
you’ve been reading this blog, it would probably strike you that central bank
foreign reserves wouldn’t be a primary area of interest for me, and you would
be right. It’s a subject I don’t know much about, but in some ways that makes
me a good person to write about it for a general audience.
That’s
because once it’s explained at a level where I can get it, I can then write it
so that a reasonably educated, but not academic, audience can understand it as
well when it appears in the university’s publication. It’s sort of the academic
version of Willie Stark’s political dictum in All the King’s Men: “You gotta get your message down so low that
even the hogs can get it.”
Once a Journalist, Always a Journalist
In
a sense, it was my two decades of working at a daily newspaper that qualifies
me for this sort of work. In the movies newspaper reporters are always chasing
scoops and doing all sort of muckraking, often at great risk to their lives and
careers. Nice work if you can get it, but in real life, the newspaperman’s lot
is a much more prosaic one.
Most
of what newspaper reporters do, even at big name papers, is compile a lot of
information, evaluate it, throw out the unimportant stuff, and reduce the rest
to its essence, typically in a few hundred words. Doing that anywhere close to
right requires skill, experience, a mind that makes connections quickly, and an
initial period of tutelage by a wise mentor. Sadly, there are very few wise
mentors left in the business these days.
Another
considerable part of the journalist’s trade is taking a report that has been
written in the jargon of a certain tribe, figuring out what it really means, then
rewriting the gist of it in plain English. If you’ve ever had to read a raw
police report or an environmental impact report, you’ll know exactly what I’m
talking about. If you haven’t, you’re lucky and should do everything you can to
preserve your innocence.
Does It Translate to Fiction?
An
obvious question is whether or not this type of training is helpful to someone
trying to write a novel. Earlier in this space, I addressed that question in
detail, but one point I’d make is that it certainly could be of help to someone
writing mystery fiction.
That’s
because the genre depends on puzzles, surprises, and the details coming
together in the right way, as well as upon the reader being able to follow the
complexities of a story. Much more than the author of so-called serious
fiction, the mystery author needs to constantly be asking, is this making
sense?
When
I was writing my mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, I tried to think of Ward Bushee, my first managing editor, who
was a stickler for clarity and accuracy. Reading over something I’d written,
I’d say, WWWA, or What Would Ward Ask? If I got the answer to that right, the
passage probably worked. If I didn’t, well, too bad Ward isn’t with us any more
to work it over with his pencil.
