Lesson on a Cardboard Shirt Board
I have always been fascinated by housekeeping descriptions of famous writers — the places in which they write, the tools they use, what they eat and drink while writing. Raymond Carver, for example, talked about writing his short stories in a Laundromat while watching twisted skeins of laundry roll around inside a washing machine. And, thanks to a pointer from Tom Johnson’s blog, I have just read that that Gay Talese writes his reporting notes in the field on cut-up cardboard shirt boards from the dry cleaners.
You may know Gay Talese as a literary nonfiction author who chronicled the inside story of a Mafia family in Honor Thy Father . As an undergraduate journalism student, I remember him as a role model for The New Journalism, a movement in the mid 70’s identified by articles that were meticulously researched and with such vivid detail that readers were convinced they were reading fiction instead of journalism. Here is Talese in an interview “The Art of Nonfiction 2,” Summer Issue of the Paris Review
as he describes his writing practice – “I cut the shirt board into four parts and I cut the corners into round edges, so that they can fit in my pocket. I also use full shirt boards when I’m writing my outlines. I’ve been doing this since the fifties.”
In place of talent, he claims he has intense curiosity and takes his craft very seriously, interviewing, studying, taking notes. Sounds like characteristics of a good technical communicator to me.
