Is deadline writing no longer good enough for BASW?

Well, the BASW would seem to have an opinion, yes, that one type of writing is fundamentally not as good as the other, if in fact it's been a decade since even the best work of that kind could make it into the book.

When you write: <i>"Sometimes I think we get too wrapped up in saying "X is better than Y" here."</i> well, I don't know about that.

But, if Bob Ryan is right, the book has decided, for a decade now, that one is so clearly better than the other, that the other can't even make a dent in the anthology.

That's why I posted the thread. Not to debate whether takeouts aren't important - despite the first post from Dick in this thread - because they're great. I read lots of them. Journalism needs them.

But, at least according to Bob Ryan, the book is saying that deadline writing is Kentucky football to the Alabama football of takeout writing. Even on Kentucky's best day, it hasn't been as good as Alabama in a decade.

As far as what would "sellable," I can't say I know one is more attractive to an audience over the other.

If the book was full of nothing but game stories. If the book took a whole year off from takeouts, do I know that sales would tank? No, I don't know that. Do the editors know that? Perhaps. But how'd they figure that out?

 

Not what I said. And, more importantly, it's not what Ryan said.

He does roll out the tired tropes about how easy it is to do takeouts - You have all the time in the world!

 

I have seen no evidence longform is more saleable than other vehicles of journalism.

 

He didn't write they were easy. But you're right that it's a trope that you have all the time in the world. That expanse of time can, in some ways, be more of a trap.

That said, if a decade's worth of books didn't have a single deadline entry, I find that extremely notable. It would appear BASW, based on its choices, is suggesting that only takeouts are worthy of its book at this time.

 

Sure, but again, "the book" is the opinion of two people. Stout, and the guest editor. And the guest editor is almost always a "name" person, someone who works as prestigious longform journalist or a book author, I suspect in part because that helps sell the book, at least in the eyes of Houghton Mifflin. The guest author's tastes are generally not going to look at, say, a deadline column from tonight's Patriots/Jets game and say "That, to me, has a special resonance and I think it should be anthologized." Especially when they're likely reading it for the first time five months after it happened.

A lot of us know the degree of difficulty associated with writing deadline gamers. I don't know that the general public cares though. In fact, I'm confident they do not. Again, BASW is a commercial enterprise. Yes, people in the business see it as the ultimate barometer of what sports stories were great this year, but it's a fool's errand to look at it like it's the ultimate judge of what was great work. The Academy Awards are entirely subjective, but at least they're something of a democracy (albeit one subject to massive marketing campaigns). BASW isn't a democracy. And that's OK! It just has to be viewed for what it is.

It baffles me that Wetzel's Brady piece did not make it into the book. That was a legitimate deadline piece. But it's hard to get too worked up over because, essentially, it comes down to the fact that two people didn't think it was worth anthologizing. Not 200 people or 2,000 people. Two. I can find two people who don't like The Godfather Part II. All you can do is shrug. It seems like someone could start a competing anthology where their take on the best sports writing was anthologized, and at times I wish they would.

But as my man 3_Octave_Fart would probably remind us (though I hesitate putting words in his mouth) if you're writing pieces with the expectation that they'll win awards or make it into BASW, whether they're 800-word gamers that crackle or 8,000-word meditations on why we play football, then you're probably not writing for the right reasons. All you can really do is write for your audience, and hope that your bosses like it and your peers respect it.

 

It depends on the medium, of course.

Your reflexive animosity toward anything of length is surprising. There is a lot of good stuff out there that isn't the writerley stuff you love to hate. I love to hate it, too. I have gone round and round on this site with the likes of former board member Azrael and others on this point.

The long-form pieces I like tell a story, and you barely notice the writer's presence. Those are the kind of stories that largely make up the BASW volume. Genuinely, these are not pieces written to get into a book or win awards.

 

The book should be broken into sections to show different types of pieces. The best journalism cannot all be longform. It'd be good for the reader to be exposed to different types of stories.

 

It's not the best journalism. It's the best writing.

 

It's not the best journalism. It's the best writing.
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ok, same argument.

 

ok, same argument.
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I would say that the best writing is almost all longform. In fact, in the vast majority of cases, I think that the knock against long-form articles, that they are "writerley" or masturbatory, is way more applicable to shorter stories written on deadline. There is space to tell a story in a lengthier piece, to pace it. There isn't the need to sex it up.

 

DoubleDown, I would not contest that at all. This isn't some Zen meditation for the writer. Somebody has to buy, consume and keep buying this for it to be sustainable art.

Dick, hatred of narrative journalism/literature- strange charge for dude whose playroom is packed to the tits with books. I admire more of the genre than I hate. The Irsay piece posted yesterday was excellent. But my time in a day and on this planet is finite, and when I see someone futzing around for the first 6-8 grafs- with no germ of the piece in sight- I get ants in my pants and ask if there's something better I could be wasting my time with.

 

Steve:

So by this same rationale, Best American Short Stories books should be broken into genres (Science fiction! Erotica! Historical realism!) to expose readers to a full breadth of writing instead of just "writing."