Speaker: Gay Talese
Session: A New Journalist's Suggestions for Daily Journalists
Dec. 1, 2001, 9:45-11:00 a.m.

Man of the Cloth
GAY TALESE KNOWS HOW TO TAILOR A STORY

By Stephanie Harvin

Dear Colleague,

What can I tell you about Gay Talese, the man whom Tom Wolfe has credited with creating "The New Journalism"? The man's a legend.

When I first saw him in the elevator this morning, I thought he was a banker or lawyer lost among the rabble of journalists at the Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference. He looked too neat in his gray plaid suit, starched white shirt and perfectly coifed silver hair. So imagine my surprise when this dapper man took the podium and started to talk about his passion for his early years at The New York Times. He was 22 years old then. He's 69 now, and I wondered what he could teach today's daily scribblers.

Boy, was I wrong.

He gave us all a lesson in the storyteller's art. Talese started innocently enough, talking about leaving daily journalism after ten years because he found it "somewhat frustrating." He wanted to write about private people, non-newsworthy people, in the same vein as a novelist, short story writer or screenwriter. These weren't the daily subjects of the paper at the time.

Then, in what seemed an odd transition, he talked about his immigrant father, a tailor who made beautifully crafted suits. His father was engaged in his world and always curious about his customers. I thought this explained Talese's sartorial splendor, but I had a hint this might be going somewhere important when he described the great care his father used to make a buttonhole.

Talese began to weave his story of craft and curiosity with his early successes with Esquire, where he used the characters of The New York Times newsroom as subjects. His point, which he made far better than I, was that we all bring our ancestral experience and our curiosity about our world to our work.

None of us were ready for the next tangent in his saga, when he talked about pursuing a story about a young man in East Baltimore who had four children by four women. His reason for wanting to do the story was simple: he wanted to know how a poor man managed to be so successful with women.

This was the big laugh, as you can imagine, and he did say that it was a story that had to hunt for a publishing home. But he had another point. The characters in your stories must live in your imagination. The sources you use become well known to you, he said, and you can't take advantage of them whether they are a movie star or a poor man in the ghetto. While he doesn't gloss over character flaws in a subject, he is very precise in his writing of their story.

"Careful writing allows you to do with the language that which sloppy writing will not allow you to do," he said. That quote is highlighted in my notebook.

By now, I was beginning to get the drift as he wove advice with war stories. Like any good writer, he was leading us on. Fiction writers were his heroes in an age when no one else was writing creative non-fiction. He learned from reading them. His curiosity has led his writing interests over a 47-year career while he has remained true to his personal interests. It was even reassuring to hear that having too much time to spend on a project is as bad as having too little (unbelievable, I know). His latest book stalled for seven years while he tried to find an organizational structure for it.

It wasn't until he pursued a story about the Chinese woman soccer player who lost the World Series Cup in 1998 that he revealed the connecting thread. No one else wanted to do the story, so he spent five months in China, just hanging out, watching her play, talking to her neighbors and getting to know her. (There is an art to just hanging around while you soak up the details and the atmosphere. Notebooks and tape recorders often stay home, he said.)

You and I know a few editors who might take issue with that last one, but it makes sense. Talese said he is trying to capture what the other person is thinking, not just a first draft of their words. His version of narrative journalism takes time, patience, curiosity and precision to weave his narrative into the whole fabric that is his trademark.

Oh, and the gray suit? Well, that too is a lesson in learning about someone. Talese doesn't own a pair of blue jeans and believes in always looking important for his subjects. He wants them to know he is a writer and someone who is not going to blend into the woodwork.

So remind me to ask the next well-dressed person I interview why he likes his clothes. It might be a key to his character – and the key to my story.

Stephanie Harvin is a features reporter for The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C.

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