Author Interview
Charlie
LeDuff
The Detroit News
From a March 2009 email interview with reporter Charlie LeDuff on a story about a frozen body found in a warehouse:
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Q:
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Your story seems to take place over the course of a little more than 24 hours. How soon after you met the firefighters at the warehouse did the piece run in the paper?
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A:
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The story appeared the morning after I met the firefighters at the warehouse. It was written on deadline.
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You probably get a lot of unusual calls. What convinced you to follow up on this one?
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A:
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The original call came from my brother, who was told about it by an acquaintance of his. I follow up most calls I receive and would most definitely follow up on any call I received about a man frozen in ice.
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Q:
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Was this story was done as part of your regular "Charlie LeDuff on Detroit" series? What determined the length?
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A:
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The story was not intended for a column or anything else. I just wrote the piece. No more thought to it than that. The length was determined by the facts as I knew them. No point in overwriting. Nobody likes that.
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Q:
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We receive far fewer short narratives as submissions than we do long narrative projects. What do you see as the advantages of short narrative?
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A:
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Modern society hasn't much time or taste for the long wind-up in the news pages: the mass of readers are distracted, Twitter-fied. Long narratives are almost extinct and don't make dollars and cents sense for today's daily papers. Less words requires more precision, a distillation of detail. It's difficult to go short.
I try to write with these thoughts in mind:
“I leave out the parts that people skip.”
– Elmore Leonard
“I was going to write you a short letter but I didn’t have the time, so I wrote you a long one instead.”
— Mark Twain |
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