From time to time, a newspaper story is so compelling it becomes a book. But not without a lot of work.
The Oregonian/OregonLive reporter Kale Williams has spent the past few years working on his book, “The Loneliest Polar Bear: A True Story of Survival and Peril on the Edge of a Warming World.”
And, now, this month, it will hit the shelves. The book project arose from his coverage of Nora, the polar bear cub that lived at the Oregon Zoo for a time and, now grown, is due back there soon.
Williams’ five-part series for The Oregonian/OregonLive, featuring photography by Dave Killen, won numerous journalism prizes but a full-length book treatment wasn’t really on his mind.
“When ‘The Loneliest Polar Bear’ series published, I wasn’t thinking about a book at all,” Williams said. “I was so tired and relieved that all of the work we had put in over the previous 10 months was being well received that working on the project more was the farthest thing from my mind.
But then he quickly heard from book publishers asking if he had considered expanding Nora’s story. “Initially, I was hesitant,” Williams said, “but when I started thinking about all the material that had been cut from the series, I knew there was an even larger story to be told.”
Nonfiction books are indeed a form of journalism, and usually more reporting, sometimes much more, needs to be done. Williams juggled his full-time reporting job, took a few short leaves and on March 23 celebrates the book’s release by Crown, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
I asked Williams what he had learned about his craft during the project.
Q: How are writing and reporting for a book different from a project in the newspaper?
A: The biggest difference I found was the individual nature of the work. When you’re working on a big project at a newspaper, there are usually numerous editors involved and feedback is almost constant. You talk about your reporting strategy, what you’re hearing from sources and how the progress is going on a daily basis.
With a book, it’s really just you and one editor, at least during the reporting process and while crafting the first draft. I’m sure this differs for everyone, but you might only talk to your editor once a month. Writing a book is, at times, a very lonely endeavor.
Q: What did you learn about writing and structure from writing a book?
A: There are some big differences between my daily work, writing relatively short news items, and working on a book, which spans about 70,000 words. Obviously with a book you have a lot more room to add context, nuance and colorful descriptions of people, places and events.
Pacing is crucial in a piece where you are asking the reader to stick with you for nearly 300 pages and you need to intersperse the sometimes-dry expository sections with moments of action or drama.
But it also struck me that, in crafting the structure of a longer piece of writing, many of the lessons I’ve learned working on stories at The Oregonian/OregonLive held true. You have to make sure you are keeping the reader engaged and that any tangents you wander down will tie back into the main narrative.
Williams’ book is not the only one that started with work for The Oregonian. Reporter Tom Hallman Jr. won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2000 series, “Boy Behind the Mask,” and later turned it into a book. The story featured the quest of a severely disfigured Portland boy who sought a dangerous surgery to change his appearance.
A former federal courts reporter for The Oregonian, Bryan Denson, wrote a six-part series for The Oregonian in 2011 called “A Spy’s Kid,” the story of a man incarcerated in Oregon who recruited his son to help him spy for Russia. Denson later wrote the book, “The Spy’s Son: The True Story of the Highest-Ranking CIA Officer Ever Convicted of Espionage and the Son He Trained to Spy for Russia.”
Sometimes the germ of a book arises from a newspaper story. Author Gabrielle Glaser was a feature writer for The Oregonian when she told the story of David Rosenberg, a supremely talented cantor in Portland who received a donated kidney from a friend. Rosenberg had been adopted and was searching for his birth mother as his health failed.
She kept in touch with Rosenberg and after leaving Oregon for New Jersey she picked up a call from him. He had found his biological mother.
Glaser’s newest book, “American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption,” just came out. It’s a human story interwoven with investigative journalism into the “coercive” system of adoption that separated Rosenberg from his birth mother.
Happy reading, everyone.
"story" - Google News
March 07, 2021 at 09:55PM
https://ift.tt/2OsU0CQ
Letter from the Editor: The Nora story evolves into book project - OregonLive
"story" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YrOfIK
https://ift.tt/2xwebYA
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Letter from the Editor: The Nora story evolves into book project - OregonLive"
Post a Comment