Being objective to observe

A writer who wants prose to sing needs to bring details to the effort. A favorite article from my files points out that this objectivity is just the sort of thing you can refine and practice from work in journalism.

I'm a practicing journalist of more than 25 years, starting with student paper reporting and editing, then on to small town papers and beyond. All that time spent staying detached from the story helps to teach you how to observe without judgement.

That favorite article comes from an 18-year-old issue of the magazine The Writer. Russell Working, the youngest winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, wrote this piece while he was working as a reporter on a daily paper.

Storytelling demands detail. The image, not the idea, is supreme. Great writers have the ability to focus their powers of observation, and to describe the images that contribute symbolically or aesthetically to the whole of their work.

Working goes on to cite the details in Hemingway's classic story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." That's a famous writer who cut his teeth on journalism. Working's article sums up by praising the practice of detachment:

Such writing requires a kind of objectivity, an ability to detach yourself from your subject and simply observe. Writers are sometimes content to slog about in abstractions on character, rather than offering telling detail.

Working has gone on to publish plenty of nonfiction, but he's still crafting short stories, too. Check out the beginning of his story "The Irish Martyr" in a 2003 issue of Zoetrope All-Story.
It's part of his just-published collection that won the Richard Sullivan Prize for Short Fiction.