Journalism That Is Alive Is Creative Writing

Careful now (I caution myself), don't get carried away. Sure, what Bernie and Martha Schein are doing at Paideia School is exciting and important. But maybe you got overexcited because, in a few days, you will begin teaching a course in writing. Remember, you'll be teaching a college course in journalism; they are teaching a middle school course in creative writing.

Creative writing and journalism are separate forms of writing with a long history of snooting each other. The difference is usually symbolized as a gap between fact and feeling. But seeing Martha and Bernie in action with their seventh and eighth grade students, then hearing them explain the theory behind their method, caused a spark to leap across that gap in my mind. I found it exciting.

Furthermore, what they are getting at seems even to hold a key to bringing alive all the dead term papers and essays and dissertations doomed to be written to torture students and teachers from grammar school to Ph.D. level.

Next week I'll tell you about this inspiring couple and my visit to their class. But, for now, know only that their students produce remarkable short stories, built on genuine feelings; stories that aspire to be — and often approach — art.

"Kids lives are full of stories," said Martha, a soft-spoken brunette from North Carolina with a mind as fluid and sure as a carpenter's level.

"At that age — 12 and 13 — they are very egocentric," added Bernie, an exhuberant man with a dark beard and fun-bright eyes. "You try to get a kid at that age to write an objective, journalistic story and you'll go bananas." So the students fictionalize their lives, using their real emotions, their conflicts, guilt-feelings, loves, hates. The standards are high and students really learn to use the language, complete with grammar, spelling and punctuation. Also with metaphor, texture and pace. But most importantly, with honest feelings.

Still it surprised me that Martha said this helps with other kinds of writing, even with the essays they will have to write in high school and college.

A college term paper (like a reporter's story) begins with gathering all the pertinent data, Martha explained. But then, the writing should be more than connecting up the information into a rational sequence; more than what is called for in the popular paperback guide, "Writing the Research and Term Paper," which defines a paper as "your factual presentation of other people's findings on a given subject."

Something must be added, Martha says, something that comes from deep inside, from the passion, the feeling, the conviction of the writer.

"When I do a paper," she explained. "OK, so I absorb a lot of material that's out there. But my writing process, what I'm going to do with this material, is not just a conscious fitting the pieces together. I dump it all in the hopper. Then, what comes out is more than I could do with it consciously; just as what these kids do with these stories is more than we could teach them to do consciously."

This is the creative process, the stuff of art. Yet, suddenly I say that it applies to good journalism, too. There is a private vision that goes into a newsman's selection of fact, choice of word. A subconscious body of judgment and taste is at work in the toughest of hardnose reporters.

Yes, by God, journalism is creative writing if what it produces is alive. For example, sitting here right now, writing this journalistic column, I think of water ground grits — of something I learned doing a story once on an old country water-powered mill: how the turning stone does not "kill" the kernel in the grinding; how the meal, then, is alive with the ingredient that is most healthful and good-tasting. That's a metaphor for my Martha-inspired idea of good writing. A news story, or a college paper is a dreary thing if it is like General Mills flour with that living germ removed to assure long shelf life.

I think of the dry bones of Ezekiel's vision and how putting bones together makes only a skeleton unless there is passion and skill enough to add flesh and the breath of life.

—Joe Cumming, Jr., The Atlantic Journal and Constitution
March 9, 1980