Writing non-fiction, a writer is basically organizing information (facts, data, analysis, observations) for your audience. It’s creative filtering, using words, sentences, and paragraphs to make sense of the world.
With photography, a photographer does much of the same, but uses portraits, pictures, and projects to organize visual information and tell a story to an audience.
Words are the basic units of measurement when writing. In photography, it’s the individual photograph. But for both, it takes talent and experience to make those basic units do work in an audience’s mind. What do they say when put together?
Taking photos is fun, but organizing information is where photography’s true power shines through.
I’ve considered myself a writer for just about as long as I learned to read and write.
When I was a kid, one of my grandparents gave me a typewriter – one of those old, mechanical models, the kind you didn’t plug into the wall. As a kid, and with the help of a model sailing ship, I wrote out pirate adventures. Way before I knew what it meant, I was creating serialized stories.
Journalism came naturally in high school and college, and the habits I picked up from my reporting days stuck with me.
Today, most of my job, and a big part of my personal life, involves writing stories – mostly non-fictional stories, but there are protagonists and a plot, just like with those early pirate tales. To write a story, I start with good notes: what’s going on? What does a person have to say about the story? What is the order of events? What happens next?
From those handwritten notes, I type them up into a text document in the same order I wrote them down. These notes are the basic building blocks of the story – section by section, event by event, quote by quote. I use these notes to connect the dots, try to make the story more interesting, and outline a basic inverted pyramid structure: all the interesting stuff goes first.
Taking those notes and arranging them, Lego-style, into a story that makes sense is where the creativity of non-fiction writing comes in. You have the story as the person told it, but you also have to act as a go-between with the reader. What questions would they have? What info do they need to understand what’s happening? Is there a point or climax to all this?
Re-arrange the story blocks, throw in a quote or three from the subject, and start and end with something interesting – that’s how I write a story. You can see this process come to life in any of my Artists In Jackson subjects. Each of those profiles started and finished with this process.
The process has served me well, and every time I start a new story, I start with a conversation and good notes. The rest is arranging those building blocks until it’s a story worth writing.
I realize that every child makes a similar pronouncement. A fireman. A policeman. A lawyer. A doctor. A superhero. And I realize that I’m far from being a full-time writer paying the bills completely through the force of my fingertips. But how often can an adult look back and see a moment like that, so defining and seemingly prophetic, and find echoes of their present within it?
For me, it was an old typewriter my grandmother picked up at a yard sale, an wooden pirate ship model that I got from who-knows-where, and a vivid imagination steeped in Saturday morning cartoons, hours playing with action figures, and a deep need to make something.
I would write these stories about a pirate ship captain and his crew, and all their adventures as they sailed the seven seas. Writing was huge for me, and as far back as junior high I remembered that wherever I ended up, it had to have something to do with writing.
My sophomore year English teacher, Mrs. Wiley, told me I had a “journalistic style” to my writing. So naturally I took that to mean I should be on the newspaper staff, and the next year I did just that. A year later, I was editor of our high school newspaper. Four years later: my college newspaper.
It’s not always clear, especially when you’re a teenager, what you should be doing with your life. Sometimes you need little pushes in a direction that’s not always clear to you at the time.
It’s still like that for me now, but it was especially true then. My biggest concerns in high school were working after school, band, and girls (probably in reverse order) – not what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
But looking back, it’s easy to see the direction my life was heading, and it all started with that old typewriter and model pirate ship.
