Passion, death, and great writing

By JoAnne Tompkins

A while back I was listening to NPR and heard an interview of Gene Weingarten, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for Feature Writing. He spoke with such clarity about the basis of great writing that I immediately purchased The Fiddler on the Subway, a collection of his feature stories. In the introduction, Weingarten tells of being a young reporter spending weeks hanging out at a seriously mismanaged sewage treatment plant, excited and disgusted by what he was seeing. Yet when he turned in his piece, his editor was quietly contemptuous, accusing him of losing his passion. He went home and got drunk.

That night, I’d learned two lessons. The first is that without passion, you have nothing. The second is that the most important words in your story are the ones you didn’t write. They’re the ones you imply—the one that you cause to pop into the reader’s mind and get her to think. “Aha!” That’s how you transform her from a passive observer into an ally.

Weingarten quit writing for many years, choosing instead to earn a steady income as an editor. In an effort to draw the best work from his writers, he developed an approach he called “the Talk.”

The script seldom varied: The writer would tell me what his story was going to be about, and then I would explain to him, patiently, why he was wrong. Your story, I would say, is going to be about the meaning of life. . . .

. . . A feature story will never be better than pedestrian unless it can use the subject at hand to address a more universal truth. And, as it happens, big truths usually contain somewhere within them the specter of death. Death informs virtually all of literature. We lust and love so we can feel more alive. We build families so we can be immortal. We crave fame, and do good works, so both will outlive us. The Gods of our choosing promise eternity.

This is the big mystery of life, and any good narrative can be made to grapple with some piece of it, large or small.

In Weingarten’s stories, we feel the longing of each of his subjects whether a clown, a cartoonist or an executive director of a small town chamber of commerce. Weingarten digs deep to find the drivers behind their passions. He reveals them fully, neither avoiding nor exploiting their quirks and failings. As a result we identify with and care about the people that populate his work.