Wednesday, March 25, 2015

The Complications of Literary Journalism

Quoting
Quoting (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
First, the interview with Robert Weschler

* Immersion reporting may justify edited accounts of conversation. Obviously we cut out fillers, and no one complains. Is conflation of time permissible? Is – as Bob Garfield suggests – everything between quotation marks sacred?

* Memoir is different

* Sophisticated readers get it, particularly when the quotes all sound the same person-to-person



What you can do in this class:

·      * vigorous descriptive language
·      * more generally, create your own tone
·      * be present in the story - that means I do not immediately reject an "I"
·      * to some degree “instigate,” though that’s tricky; you tell me: what would be “fair” instigation and what wouldn’t?

What you can’t do:


Make things up, including extreme compression of quotes.

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