In the late ’90s, he transmogrified from editor back to writer. He had stopped being a writer because he thought he would never be a great one. All those years of fixing other people’s copy had made him a student of narrative assembly. He had developed theories, including a grand philosophy of storytelling. All good stories, Weingarten had come to believe, are about the meaning of life.
That philosophy of storytelling made him the only person to have won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing twice.
While I agree that the theory is almost indisputably true – that a story has got to have some depth for it to be “good” – the theory’s usefulness seems handcuffed by the vagueness of its basis, “the meaning of life.” Nobody knows what that means, not even an existential philosopher like me.
Mercifully, Weingarten adds a little substance:
In his introduction to his collection, The Fiddler in the Subway, Weingarten writes that a feature story “will never be better than pedestrian unless it can use the subject at hand to address a more universal truth.” Those universal truths always come around to a favorite maxim of Weingarten’s, one that he cribbed from fellow neurotic Franz Kafka: “The meaning of life is that it ends.”
Better. But still not completely satisfying. Is this suggesting that every [good] story should at least indirectly deal with death? I hope not, and I don’t think that’s Weingarten’s point. I think the problem is that he hasn’t fully developed a point.
I am conceited and Gen Y enough to believe that I with my blogspot.com domain can come up with a better, more instructive theory of good writing than Mr. two-time Pulitzer / “America’s best journalist” dude. Watch me:
A good piece of writing will take a reader, stone-faced and groggy at the end of a long day, and, from the first line, not draw him in as much as imbibe him. A good piece of writing doesn’t squeeze the remaining interest-juice out of the reader, it actually generates it, and does so in a way that few other things can. It generates a brand of interest so intense that it actually outmuscles all other stimuli in the reader’s perceptual environment so that, in a very real way, the room effectively disappears. And then, once attention is in full stranglehold, it graduates from a good piece of writing to a great piece of writing by doing exactly three things to its captive:
It makes him (1) laugh, (2) think, and (3) cry.
If that doesn’t sound familiar to you, it should. It’s not actually my theory. It’s Jimmy V’s.
I am not sure why those three things, of all the many things in the universe of possibilities, are the important criteria for judging great writing or a great ESPY speech or a great day, but I’m confident that they are. It seems that you haven’t exercised all the primary psychospiritual muscle groups unless you’ve been induced, unwittingly and uncontrollably, to laugh, think, and cry. I can’t defend it any more than that. It’s a Just Is sort of deal.
And if a pile of words can wrestle your attention away and do those three things to you in a 20-40 minute sitting, when you think about, that’s some feat.
So feat-y, in fact, that there have been only three writers who have done it to me more than once:
David Foster Wallace
William Deresiewicz
Gene Weingarten
This seems important enough that I’ve decided to start documenting writings/films/whatever that induce the L.-T.-C. effect in me. That start is here.
