First-person feature stories?

They couldn't get a more recent photo of a draft board?

 

A real question regarding the topic!

@Dick Whitman, years ago, there was a thread discussing, I think difference in writing between Esquire/GQ and New Yorker (I think that was the comparison). I think you, not surprisingly, preferred the New Yorker. I worship the New Yorker too, though also love the style of Esquire stories, etc (again, probably not surprisingly, more than you do). But how do you view The New Yorker's first-person pieces? They have a lot of them. Which is interesting because I don't think the New Yorker is a place people think about when they talk about the rise of first-person pieces. It's websites primarily, then magazines like NY Times or Esquire, etc. So for you, assuming you still do prefer the New Yorker, what about those 1st-person pieces work more than they do in other places? Is it simply because of the style of the overall writing, or is it something specific with how they handle 1st-person? They are, I think, usually more unobtrusive, if that makes sense. So perhaps that would be a factor.

Or if anyone else has thoughts on that, the board is, for now anyway, obviously open!

 

I can get into this more later, with some examples. (This week's issue, in fact, just arrived.) I think the New Yorker uses first-person quite a bit, but almost never in the sense that the story becomes about the writer's personal journey of self-discovery. (As much as I enjoyed the Roof piece in "GQ," for example, and as deep as the reporting was, it certainly at bottom became a piece about the writer's journey of self-discovery. I mean, it worked in large part, though she laid it on thick in the conclusion. But that's what it was.)

The Julian Assange piece recently by Raffi K. utilized a lot of first person, but that worked on several levels. It established credibility - the writer had a long-time relationship with Assange, which I think builds some amount of credibility with the reader. (This can work the other way, too - the writer is being honest about his limitations.) In fact, I think that's one big reason the New Yorker probably does this, to let the reader know precisely where the reporter is positioned. His limitations. His access. Compare to a sports gamer in your local daily, for example. The quotes bubble up as if from thin air. But the context of the interactions are illuminating, to me. Are they just transactional, as in a sports postgame or White House press briefing? Or did the reporter and source hit it off a little more than that? The New Yorker appears to recognize this. Also, you can probably learn a lot about a person by how that person interacts with other humans. First person, as the New Yorker often employs it, gives us that.

I like it. I think most long-term features should probably use first-person to some degree. It's just more intimate. "Outside" uses it a lot, too.

I guess, to summarize, this almost needs to be two threads, because there are two major ways in which first-person is used: (1) The writer is on a journey of self-discovery (ex. the Roof piece and a lot of adventure pieces in "Outside," for example; (2) The writer is narrating the reporting, but isn't really a developed character in the piece.

I wrote a whole lot of longer form (for newspapers) features in my time, but I'm not sure I ever used first-person more than a time or two. Even when you can go as long as 100 inches or more, newspaper pieces don't always have the breathing room to do it. I also don't know that workaday sports ("I turn off of Lake Shore Drive and head west on Addison toward the ballpark, where the security guard checks my credential before waving me along ...") necessarily lends itself to it as much as stories where establishing an otherwise unfamiliar setting is important ("The security guard at the Ecuadorean Embassy stares my ID, then disappears for fifteen excruciating minutes before Assange appears before me ...").

 

I'm fairly convinced that it's house style at The New Yorker to have a first person reference in the story at some point, along with the time element — "It was a cold and rainy Wednesday in May when Philip Roth came downstairs and answer the door of his lower Manhattan brownstone in his socks — early in the piece.

I still think we need more example of pieces where first person doesn't work to talk about why it doesn't work.

AJR wrote about how much Vice relies on the first person in its storytelling a few years ago.

Vice, and the Trend of First-Person Journalism - American Journalism Review

I get kind of frustrated when I read a piece that's just entirely pulled out of someone's head. People cite David Foster Wallace all the time when the blame the Grantland generation for its navel gazing, but Wallace (for all his faults; and he certainly had them) was a master observer. He detailed the shit out of scenes. He wrote down everything he saw in his notebook, and if you read stuff like Consider the Lobster (his piece about the Maine Lobster festival, and whether lobster boiling was ethical) you can see he did a shit ton of reporting after the fact to support his thesis. It wasn't just "Oh man, I think this might hurt lobsters based on how I feel."

 

Here is a feature in the new issue of "Esquire" about the girl who was convicted of manslsughter in her boyfriend's suicide.

The writer takes a long time to enter - nearly three printed pages - and finally does so after unspooling the pretrial background.

The homicide trial began this past June at the Bristol County Juvenile Court in Taunton, Massachusetts. I had been covering the case since last December, when only a handful of reporters clustered together on the frozen concrete, grousing about why they couldn't be assigned a murder in Florida.

The first-person establishes that the writer is an eyewitness to the events she describes in the second third of the story, although she only breaks the fourth wall sparingly for a while.

He's a huge presence in the final third, though, when he analyzes the facts and tracks down witnesses in an effort to reach conclusions about Carter and the verdict. It works for me. By the end, when he renders her determination (in first-person), he has very craftily and steadily, while patiently increasing his involvement, built up the trust with the reader to credibly issue his judgment.

There is no journey of self-discovery for the writer. The focus remains on Carter.

Behind the Scenes of the Michelle Carter Verdict - Conrad Roy Suicide Trial

 

I'm so used to the time element leading pieces in "The New Yorker" that I feel disoriented when I start a story that does not. I haven't written for publication in a couple years, but I bet 75-80 percent of my features began that way after a certain point. I think it works marvelously. (I was always against writerly ledes. Learning this trick was a revelation. Now I use it for the fact sections of legal briefs.)

I digress.

 

It doesn't work in a lot of the Roof piece. It doesn't work when she asks us to accept her premise that people at the white church were looking at her funny. That's an enormous swing and miss. It does work when she meets with Roof's dad.

 

Why don't you accept her premise? Do you feel like a black woman entering an all-white church in Charleston would be seeing uneasiness where it might not exist, or that she doesn't do enough to prove it exists beyond asking for the readers trust?

 

I think both of those things. It also just fits oh-so-neatly into the narrative she set out to tell: Black woman reports on Charleston race-motivated killings, and it was sure different for her than it would have been for a white person! And so she needs things to happen that make it matter that she's reporting this and not some white dude, right? So she draws conclusions from some glances. We can't prove her wrong. They can't really deny it. Hey, it's her reality! I understand her feeling uneasy there. But the way she writes it reminds me of Lena Dunham attributing thoughts to Odell Beckham. Dunham later walked her comments back - she explained that she was playing around with her emotional vulnerabilities, what she goes through in that situation, a chubby girl seated alongside a Greek god. And you know what? Twit that she is, I still believe her. But she missed her aim.

It's possible that's what the writer here was trying to do, too, although the fact that she brought it up to the pastor in that interview leads me to believe that she does not fancy herself an unreliable narrator. I often feel the same way when this device is used in fiction. It's just too easy to see what you want to see in another person's expression, and it gets extremely iffy when you are seeing micro-targeted racism.

There are exceptions to every rule, and I'll probably now notice five times today when a writer pulls it off. But here, it felt like cheating.

 

Read up on George Plimpton, if you haven't already - specifically, "Paper Lion."

I've written a few first-person features and had a lot of fun. I tried to take the reader along for the ride without the "I did this," "I did that" you mention; sprinkled it throughout with little asides. Good luck, and HAVE FUN!!!

 

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