Dec
4
2005
The Reporter vs. the Novelist (Part II)
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THE NOVELIST is a private creature, the reporter a public one, and the two have little to nothing in common. That more or less sums up the first half of this essay—last month’s entry. I am going to spend the rest of it trying to demonstrate another mundane assertion: one cannot be both a novelist and a reporter at the same time.
Unless you share, along with Dr. Jekyll or Gollum, the capacity to instantaneously morph into another creature for a few hours, it is not possible to be at once a novelist and a reporter. Part of the difficulty is that both the newspaper and the novel are slave drivers who demand, even while stroking your ego and chuffing you up, that you offer your soul—something that cannot be shared like bread. You may serve one but not two masters.
Nov
4
2005
The Reporter vs. the Novelist (Part I)
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EVERY NEWSPAPER REPORTER at some point in her hectic career flirts with the idea of cutting loose to write a novel, just as every novelist dreams in his wretched solitude of a more gregarious life at a daily newspaper. This is to a great extent due to the misperception that the pasture is greener on the other side of the literary fence, but there is also a deeper sense that there exists the same blood-bond between the reporter and the novelist as there exists between twins who have been separated at birth and raised at opposite ends of the globe; naturally one dreams, even if mundane realities prevent it, of dropping one’s job and setting off for the willies in an oh-brother-where-art-thou trek for the long lost twin.
There is also the fact that every writer—or at least the anxious, competitive, insecure sort of writer, which accounts for a hefty chunk of the good ones—is continuously measuring his or her life by the lives of past writers, and any glance at the biographies of canonized writers will suggest that a ‘real’ writer should not be a virgin in either reporting or fiction. Of course this is baloney and many of the best fiction writers have never been reporters, and the same holds vice versa. But the myth nonetheless remains, and so the leapfrogging of writers between fiction and reporting goes on, only further perpetuating the illusion that there is some essential bond between the two.
