Some years ago I undertook the laborious task of unlearning the most egregious of the journalistic lessons I learned during my four expensive years at Medill School of Journalism.  Given that I didn’t pay that much attention in class – I was too busy alternately stopping the war and knocking on the doors of perception – I was surprised to discover that I’d internalized enough to make the transition from news writer to storyteller a long and challenging one.

I had to unlearn, among other things, what a story was and how to write it.  I had to unlearn how to interview.  I had to unlearn what it meant to revise.  I had to unlearn voicelessness. I had to unlearn arrogance.  As it turned out, most of the important lessons I had to unlearn had to do with people. 

I had been taught in journalism classes to think of people in very specific ways.  People were either objects in a story or they were sources of information in a story.  If they were objects, things happened to them (they were robbed; they won the lottery) or they did things (gave a speech, voted for a bill, hit a home run).  If they were sources of information, you mined them for usable material.  Either way, what you did with people was this:  You called them up and asked them questions.  They answered.  You scribbled.  If you were lucky, you got a good quote.  You hung up the phone.  Maybe, if you were looking for “color,” and if your editor didn’t expect the story in thirty minutes, you actually posed these questions in person.  And, in between scribbling the answers to the questions, you looked around for descriptive details to insert in the story (if your editor hadn’t warned you that you had only seven inches).  “Cluttered desk,” you wrote down diligently.  “Coffee stain on tie.” 

But most times, you never saw the people who were either the objects or the sources in your story.  Email had not been invented back then (although we did have indoor toilets), but had it been, a news writer trained as I was would certainly have used it extensively.  And so there would have been a good chance you would not even hear the voices of the people in your story, be able to pick up any hesitation, any excitement or boredom, hiccoughs, regional accents, whatever.  But really, it didn’t matter if you saw a person or heard a person, or how little you knew a person, because people only existed to tell you things or to answer your specific questions so you could tell things about them.

This attitude toward people and their place not just in a story as written but in the process of thinking about and developing a story was the biggest thing I had to unlearn, my biggest barrier to being the kind of writer I wanted to be.  I started unlearning on the very first journalism job I landed after graduation.  I remember, during this brief and undistinguished stint as a reporter, doing a story about de-institutionalized mental patients (this was California) who were writing poetry and painting as a way of dealing with their psychoses. I actually met several of them, read their work, saw their paintings, asked the questions, got the good quotes, wrote the story.  A few weeks after the story was published in the crappy little newspaper I worked for, one of the women I’d interviewed, the one I quoted most, committed suicide.