Pitfalls, Part 1
Editing begins on “The Empire Strikes Back”
Last Monday with Medium, The Big Roundtable launched the Open Rehearsal Project, in which we invite you to watch—and weigh in, if you choose—as Noah Sneider does what every writer does: drafts, struggles, re-drafts, struggles, and finishes a piece of in-depth journalism about Russia and Ukraine. Below you’ll find the first email exchange between Sneider and The Big Roundtable’s editor, Mike Hoyt, as the two work to set the piece down the right course.
From the writer, Noah Sneider
Monday, June 9, 2014 at 8:19 a.m. ET / 4:19 p.m. MSK
currently dealing w a visa issue. went in to sign — i was told — one document. am now stuck in bureaucratic circles of hell — have to collect 7 signatures from surly women in 7 separate offices spread across 2 buildings. waiting now as one discusses something w a friend on the phone. It’s sunny out, but rainy lightly — summer in Moscow. It might be a while.
In the meantime, an update on where the piece is at… to be honest, I’m struggling with a few things, some having to do with story structure, others with the idiosyncrasies of my memory. I’ve been torn about where to pick up the writing again. After everything that happened in eastern Ukraine, it’s hard to put myself back in Crimea and recall what it felt like. At first I thought it’d be better to just raid my eUkr notebooks and write those moments while they were still fresh in my mind. but working backwards chronologically left me w a mess of anecdotes and no sense of how they fit into the narrative… So I stopped and instead went all the way back to the beginning of my travels and tried it from there…
This brings me to the big structural/narrative challenges that I’d love your input on. First is the Q of chronology. When we originally conceptualized this piece, we talked about an ‘illumination rounds’-esque collection of set pieces. This made a lot of sense when we were just talking Crimea, but given all the moving parts now, maybe it makes more sense to give the reader a sense of my movements spatially and temporally. if not an exact chronology, at least to anchor it in a few places?
The other challenge is how to incorporate the historical narrative. I’ve been trying to weave it into the contemporary yarn by using objects and places that still exist as links (a piece of good advice from an editor of a piece I worked on for mcsweeney’s a few years ago). I worry that it’s getting too jumpy though. Pls watch carefully for that. Also other ideas on how to handle this q wld be much appreciated…
Sent from my iPhone
From the editor, Mike Hoyt
Monday, June 9, 2014 at 10:33 a.m. ET
Your opening, the “Deep History” draft, is beautifully written and deeply inviting, but I am wondering if the questions you are asking in this email now—about structure and the use of the chronology of both events and of your travels, and about how to weave in the history that is so central to the piece—might require us to go back and make clearer in Deep History what the whole piece—The Empire Strikes Back” is setting out to do.
One thing the original “Illumination Rounds” had going for it was the very simple question at its heart: What is it like to be a grunt in the Vietnam war? Every “round” addressed that question, and the reader always knew that somehow.
Here we have a more complex situation to explain. And thus a harder question to address, or a more complex argument to make. But even so, it feels to me that if the readers truly understands the question/argument you set out to address/articulate—if we can make it simple and clear—they’ll go along with you on the journey, even if the structure for doing so gets complicated. In other words the question has to be simple even if the answer is not. So let’s talk about the question/argument first, the “high concept” as Michael put it in the earlier conversation, and then the structure.
Actually, you’ve almost done it already. Right in the beautiful second graf:
“This is a Ukrainian story, but it’s not really about Ukraine, not really about soldiers and seizures and referendums. The cold rationality of geopolitics has no place here. This — the precipice that the world is teetering on — is about identity and memory and (deep) history. This is a story about the Russian Empire.”
It’s great. And seriously inviting. But this is the lynchpin of the piece, and it needs to be an even clearer road sign, I think, and tell us what we are setting out to do. First of all, smallish problem, the first word “This” is ambiguous. Does it mean the words we are reading now, your piece? Or does it mean the whole turn of current events? Make clear.
Second, that geopolitics has “no place” here feels like an overstatement, maybe. No place at all? what you are arguing is that other things far surpass those concerns, but I don’t think you’d say they don’t exist.
But most important, it feels to me as if you make a flat statement that this turn of events is about “identity and memory and (deep) history. This is a story about the Russian empire.” It is an argument, and a pretty clear one, in fact. But it’s big, and it doesn’t open up to a narrative, exactly; it doesn’t tell us what about it or how you are going to get to it that statement.
What if the next sentence was something like: “I landed in TK in Crimea on DATETK, and as I witnessed events on the ground, and as I traveled north to Ukraine as the action moved there, and finally to Moscow, to try to understand these things, I found myself moving backward in time, as well, into the deep history that shapes the Russian present and makes TK inevitable…”
Or something like that? It promises not a 26-volume of Russian history but a journey through this region that, as it goes, illuminates the history that is propelling events. In Illumination Rounds.
It’s an idea, anyway. I do like the idea of a chronology based on your journeys through space and time there. I think chronology will be your true friend. How we weave in—and order—the history is trickier; as you say, but doable.
Maybe you want to get to Prince Vladmir where you do here or maybe he comes later, as you dive deeper into history as you go. We could alternate illumination rounds with related history. Not sure, but maybe that’s a next conversation.
What do you think so far?
