About a year and a half ago, Esquire writer Chris Jones became obsessed with writing a profile about the movie critic Roger Ebert, who lost the ability to speak in 2006 after a series of surgeries. Jones pitched that idea for a year before his editors finally approved it – after another story (on singer Taylor Swift) for the March 2010 issue fell through.
The Ebert profile attracted more than 800,000 online readers in its first ten days on the magazine’s website. Tim McGuire from Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication said the piece “manhandles our soul and wrings emotion from every pore.” A number of film bloggers put their thumbs way up.
I’m among those who found the piece deeply moving. I love the scene in the movie theater, where Jones captures the critic’s process beautifully, his great wordless energy, all those scribbled-on notebook pages strewn about in the dark. Along with vivid details – exactly nine purple seats, Ebert’s blue fine tip pen, his cardigan zipped up over his neck bandages– the scene is infused with the critic’s emotion, his “kid joy.”
When Jones spoke about his story at the City and Regional Magazine Association this summer, I was in the audience of mostly magazine editors hoping Jones would talk about how he renders emotional depth on the page. I wanted to learn how he makes readers cry.
Chekhov said, “If you wish to move your reader, write more coldly.” Jones’ writing, however, is warm like a greenhouse in winter, a respite from the arctic wordsmithing of too many other magazine writers. In a 1979 New York Times essay, John Irving told us what we risk when we avoid the emotional. “A short story about a four-course meal from the point of view of a fork will never be sentimental; it may never matter very much to us, either.”
Jones takes plenty of emotional risks with his subject matter. His most recent National Magazine Award winner, “The Things That Carried Him,” was about a soldier’s death in Iraq, told in reverse chronological order and steeping us in the emotional reality of everyone from the gravedigger to the soldier’s mother.
Given Jones’ heart-sanctioned journalistic choices, I found what he said about restraint particularly interesting. He has a hard time with it. His editor, Peter Griffin, often excises his favorite line. “He has saved me countless times from sentimentality,” Jones said. “He makes the 10-percent cut that saves me from going to far.”
When I e-mailed Jones for more on this, he shared an example of where Griffin saved him from “Oliver Stone-ing,” what he calls the line that instructs, “THIS IS WHEN YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO CRY.” Earlier in the story, Jones quoted part of Ebert’s online tribute to his late partner, Gene Siskel, who died of a brain tumor in 1999.
“We once spoke with Disney and CBS about a sitcom to be titled ‘Best Enemies,’” Ebert wrote. “It would be about two movie critics joined in a love/hate relationship. It never went anywhere, but we both believed it was a good idea. Maybe the problem was that no one else could possibly understand how meaningless was the hate, how deep was the love.”
Jones’ too-sentimental line came at the end of this next excerpt, the climax of the story, where Jones described Ebert’s reaction to finding out Disney had removed his embedded video tributes for terms-of-use violation.
“He types in capital letters, stabbing at the keys with his delicate, trembling hands: MY TRIBUTE, appears behind the cursor in the top left corner. ON THE FIRST SHOW AFTER HIS DEATH. But Ebert doesn’t press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still, now just shapes and angles, just geometry filling the white screen with black like the three squares. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now. He’s standing outside on the street corner and he’s arching his back and he’s shouting at the top of his lungs.”
After “lungs,” Jones had written, “how deep was the love.”
Although the line echoed the earlier passage, providing another little thread to pull the story together – something Jones usually likes to do – it was too forceful. Griffin ended the sentence at “lungs.”
Jones said, “I think there’s so much truth to the idea that the secret to a good story is the stuff we don’t write, the little gaps we leave. . . . Peter remembered when I didn’t that our readers aren’t stupid. We don’t need to lead them all the way down the road. We can point them to the road we’d like them to take, but then they’re on their own, and that’s how it should be.”
I find students often mistake sentimentality, which is deadly, for empathy, which is necessary. If you’re capable of empathy (and I am paraphrasing the American Heritage Dictionary here), you are able to understand the feelings or predicaments of another. You don’t need to be a laid-off accountant to write about how a laid-off accountant feels. You just need to have the emotional discipline to step out of your own life for a while and really pay attention to what she says and does. Nonfiction writers can take a cue from Hemingway here. He didn’t write emotionally; he showed emotion through his characters’ words and actions. Nonfiction writers just need to know which of our subjects’ quotes and actions to choose – and we need to hang around with our subjects long enough to get them.
It takes a great deal of rationality to experience empathy and to relay how your subject feels to a reader. Sentimentality, on the other hand, is characterized by the absence of reason or thought. It’s straight emotion, gushy and mawkish. Sentimentality is the football fan raging in the stands after his hometown team loses. Not the best person to ask about the game.
Jones offered this advice: “Trust your readers. . . . Find a great editor, a true partner. And understand that the word ‘restraint’ is a terrific compliment, maybe the best compliment. Think George Clooney in ‘Michael Clayton’ over Al Pacino in ‘Scent of a Woman.’ Sometimes a look says a lot more than a whole bunch of shouting.”
This article was originally published on my blog, InspireMeJProf.
