Making Or Finding

by Dennis Green

“Fiction is making a story, but journalism is finding a story.” So says Rolling Stone cover story writer Walter Kirn, and I find his comment compelling. I do both, have just started a new novel called An Independent Man, and I continue to cover profiles and issues I find around me in Alameda. And I enjoy the hell out of doing either one.

And the latest development in technology is right in keeping with that distinction. My new iPad just arrived, and I set it up, synced it with my iMac desktop computer and my iPhone, and already I can detect the major difference between computing and “padding” about the house or lying for hours in dialysis clinic.

The iPad is a device primarily for consuming information, reading books, watching music videos and movies, surfing the Web, responding to emails, reading newspapers and magazines and doing research. The screen size and touch feature make all those activities, FABULOUS!

For the actual composition of a story, an article, an op-ed piece — producing — I’ll probably continue using my iMax.

It isn’t a matter of leaning forward or kicking back, as some pundits say. I have a little wireless laptop keyboard that works with either the iMax or iPad screen, so that’s not an issue. Composition on the wireless keyboard is a dream, its keys larger than a laptop and more convenient than a cabled keyboard.

But writing a non-fiction story requires being in a very different mode than writing fiction, (and poetry is in the next county). It’s not just a posture, but an attitude, in every sense of that word, including the geographic. Fiction happens in a land apart from the one we live in. It may be happening in a different time as well, but it’s somewhere else, some other place than where I’m sitting now.

Journalism — whether its commentary, critique or reporting — requires that you “Be Here Now,” that is, on the spot where the action is unfolding, face to face with an interviewee, or as close to an event as you can get. Even the armchair historian must find ways to get back to the original sources, and imagine living in that time.

I set out, almost without any intention and certainly without any expectation, to get to the heart of the supposed need for a new, much higher parcel tax for school funding on top of current property taxes here in Alameda, still inflated for many homeowners. I interviewed two school board trustees and the superintendent twice. I had no agenda. As a former teacher, I wanted to discover what it would really take to improve the outcomes of our public schools, where fewer than 10,000 students are enrolled.

Then I went online and did my research. I studied the new “Master Plan,” the AUSD website, dug up sites detailing test scores and ethnic/racial makeup, how salaries and outcomes in Alameda compare to all of Alameda County, which includes Berkeley and Oakland. Amazing stuff.

But in a more evocative mode, I wrote one night the following: “Something within us is seeking to know the infinite, and will never be satisfied with the obvious, the immediate. But why then are we so obsessed with romance, work, community and family?” Now I can see how the same person could produce both the reportage about the AUSD school tax and write those more philosophical lines, but the two modes of thought are still different.

I took my Kindle e-book along to the dialysis clinic the other day, and found it the perfect way to pass some time. I have six books downloaded onto it, and when I tired of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, I just switched over to Don Lattin’s The Harvard Psychedelic Club, where I learned a lot about the Sixties.

As a content producer or consumer, I’m happy in either modality. I’m both a sponge and a squid, and the ink I squirt get will into your eyes.

©2010 Dennis Green