Would you like to be one of the so-called “literary journalists”? The sort of scribe whose byline evokes a sort of intellectual respect, the kind of scribbler who gets months or years to craft a magazine piece of sterling clarity? Would you someday like to call John McPhee your spiritual godfather?

May I suggest a three-step process?

1. Buy The New New Journalism by Robert Boynton. It’s a series of interviews with lit-j superstars on their jobs: how they find stories, how they interview, how they organize, how they write. It’s refreshingly craft-oriented and practical. Writing is a solitary profession, and it’s great to see the quirky systems writers assemble for themselves to be productive. (Gay Talese’s involves a pair of binoculars, corkboard, and a photocopier set at 67% zoom.)

The list of interviewees is impressive: Talese, Susan Orlean, Ron Rosenbaum, William Langewiesche, Michael Lewis, and my personal idol Calvin Trillin.

2. Buy The Complete New Yorker Book and DVD. Yes, it’s $100. (Actually, just $63 at Amazon.) But come on! It’s eight DVDs with the complete text of every issue of The New Yorker, 1925 to the present.

Seriously, the complete text. Which means you get a healthy subset of everything ever written by all those folks listed above. The complete A.J. Leibling! All the Malcolm Gladwell you can handle! Calvin Trillin’s brilliant U.S. Journal stories from the ’70s! McPhee McPhee McPhee! Sy Hersh after Sy Hersh! White and Lardner and Angell, oh my! “In Cold Blood,” “Hiroshima,” and “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” in the orignal forms!

This may expose me as a geek, but I’m about to wet my pants with excitement.

3. Work really hard.

08 July 2005

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