Clive Thompson: “Reading poetry shakes up my brain”

The Wired and NYT Magazine writer explains how ‘intense, nutty’ poems can break your writing rut

Bobbie Johnson

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Clive Thompson’s new book, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds For the Better, was published in 2013 by Penguin. He’s a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and Wired.

We asked him how he writes.

What’s the one thing you’ve learned over time that you wish you knew when you started out?

That the craft of long-form magazine writing shares a common language with cinema and documentary film-making.

I first encountered this idea back in 1998 when I read a profile in the Globe and Mail of Malcolm Gladwell. In it, Henry Finder — Gladwell’s editor at The New Yorker— talked about the relationship between cinematic technique and the technique of magazine writing. In cinema, for example, there’s a “two-shot”, a moment when the camera is filming two people who are talking, neither of whom is acknowledging the presence of the camera. And there’s a one-shot, where someone is talking directly into the camera — and thus talking directly to the audience. Each of these shots has a different dramatic feel, a different energy.

Long-form magazine writing employs very similar techniques. There are moments when you’re describing two people talking to each other, in a classic two-shot manner. There are moments when you’re relaying quotes and comments that an interviewee said directly to you, and only to you: That’s a one-shot. And as in cinema, these each have a very different energy and drama on the page. And if you think about all the other types of shots in cinema, many have analogues in magazine writing too, like close-ups or panning shots.

The deeper point here is that variety is crucial. If you watch a movie that consists of nothing but the same type of shot, it becomes aesthetically wearying. The same goes for long-form magazine writing. If you use the same type of “shot” for the entire story, it gets dull. In contrast, when a story moves between different types of shots, it adds a really delightful level of drama and tension — and of course, different types of shots are better or worse for delivering different types of story, information, or characterization.

Once I’d grasped this technical point, it not only helped my writing, but helped my reporting, because it made me aware of the need to gather many different types of shots.

This rule isn’t absolute, of course. There are many types of long-form magazine writing where thinking cinematically isn’t crucial or even useful — as with, say, a long book review that’s primarily an “ideas” piece, an argument. (Indeed, most arts criticism doesn’t really work this way.) But whenever you’re doing something that hinges on character, story, or scene, thinking like a documentarian can be very useful.

Is there a book, article or story that you turn to time and time again? What does it give you? Why do you like it so much?

There’s no single book that I turn to regularly for inspiration. But there is one pattern that runs through my reading, which is that I read a lot of poetry: Contemporary stuff, classical and ancient stuff, whatever. I think it’s because I often spend a lot of my time reading scientific or academic prose — white papers, conference proceedings, government reports. I wouldn’t say it’s all “dry” (some scientists can be quite good writers, even in their papers) but the prose in can be exhaustingly precise. So reading a bit of poetry kind of helps shake up my brain a bit. Good poetry uses metaphor and language in ways that are really intense, nutty, and vibrant. It feels like it opens up the possibility space inside my head before I start writing.

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Bobbie Johnson

Causing trouble since 1978. Former lives at Medium, Matter, MIT Technology Review, the Guardian.