Mining for colour and depth
The art of profile-writing is in the details, and the people skills.
That morning I was way out in the suburbs at the far western edge of the country and badly in need of a coffee, only there was nothing around within walking distance because nothing around Perth is ever within walking distance.
Braden, the guy I had been talking to, offered to give me a lift to the nearest café, a humble little fish and chip shop owned by a Turkish couple next to a service station. In thanks, I bought him a large flat white.
The coffee was good but had a faint metallic taste of iron. Braden had nowhere to be, so we sat at the tables outside in the sun watching the traffic go by. He was between jobs, he told me over the hour we spent together, and it had been that way ever since high school when he missed out on getting into medicine by one point. After that, he had just drifted through life.
“So this book I’m working on,” I said, “The one about the mining boom. Reckon you can help me out with it?”
I invited Braden to meet later me for a drink at Black Tom’s, the bar where the mining barons used to sup champagne during the height of the boom, so I could talk to him about being long-term unemployed. Though it wouldn’t exactly turn out as planned, the dynamic it would set up appealed to hooligan in me and, I thought, would make for a telling scene.
It is not an original insight that reporters have a certain weakness for powerful people, but it is one worth remembering. Every day, a corps of journalists across the nation go to work and spend their hours scribbling down the thoughts of rich and powerful people.
From the CEO in the boardroom to the legislator in the chamber or the celebrity in front of a photo-wall, most coverage, most of the time, is about the people who decide things.
There’s real public interest in knowing what these people are thinking, but the rest of us, the majority of us, aren’t deciders. We’re the people who spend our lives navigating a world made by someone else, usually somewhere else.
Given the choice, I prefer to write about those people who live someone else’s decisions.
If you want to get technical, I’m a profile writer. At my best and free of constraints, what I look for in a story is colour and depth. One without the other is a failure. Done right, my work should put some human flesh on an abstract issue by sketching a person’s thoughts and feelings as they react to the world they find themselves in. It doesn’t need to capture everything, but it should function like a photograph, a small vignette from a moment in time, set in ink for the historical record.
In this, details matter. What might be obvious to us now, may not be in ten, fifteen years time. What seems minor today could make a world of difference tomorrow. When I write about someone, I want to know how they think about themselves, how they understand their place in the world, how they ended up where they are, what they wear, how they talk and how they walk. If possible, I want to experience something with them.
Just being in an environment with a person gives you insight into their life and character. It’s in the bitter taste of the beer you’re both drinking. It’s how the mother who lost her son reaches for the pendant around her neck when she thinks of him. It’s the way a guy twice your physical size leans across the centre console of his 4WD, looks you square in the eyes and tells you in a flat tone: “Now listen, I respect you, just don’t fuck with me.”
I’ve heard it said that you have ten minutes to build rapport with someone. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. I don’t think of what I do as some kind of zero-sum game where winning is to gain someone’s trust. I actually like people and I care about what happens to them.
And when you are out in a field or standing on a street, looking to get to know someone, there are no easy answers. There are no press conferences, or speeches, or media statements feeding you the material. No one cares about your CV or publication credits. No amount of ass-kissing and name-dropping is going to get you anywhere.
The best you can do is show a little interest in someone other than yourself. You can ask simple questions. You can listen. You can crack a joke or, if someone is in the middle of a job, maybe ask to watch awhile.
Don’t be put off by the off-colour humour, or the awkward attempts to describe something. Even if someone turns out to be a bully or a liar, it’s still helpful to know what made them that way.
The rule, I’ve learned, is don’t be an asshole about it. Don’t ask for an interview — “interview” is code for “interrogate” — ask people to help you out. Try talking about the issues like the experts do when they knock off for drinks. Euphemism and technical jargon are the essence of wank and a tactical f-bomb is more likely to make friends than platitudes. Be across your brief, but leave the pretence for meetings with your boss. It’s okay to admit you don’t know something. That’s how you learn stuff.
This is because accessibility is everything, at every stage of the process. It should be obvious, but reporters are no use to anyone if we’re only speaking to the guild. Journalism should always seek the widest possible audience — though make no mistake, just because I write in a plain, conversational style, doesn’t mean I don’t know how to use the fancy words.
Sometimes it doesn’t work out. I’ve been lied to and mislead a couple times now and it does make you feel like an idiot. But you learn from it. Not all of us have the resources to do this sort of work, either. It takes time and money, and often we have none.
When it does all come together the results can be deeply moving, though not everyone will agree with me. People who live comfortable lives tend to read my books and tell me they are just collections of sad stories. The people who have lived those stories tell me how nice it is to finally see themselves in print. They aren’t afraid of sadness or tragedy. Chances are, they’ve known both at some point. Happy endings are the stuff of fairy tales, not journalism.
As US reporter Charlie LeDuff once said, news is bad because it isn’t supposed to happen. A person should be born without complication, grow up well fed and healthy, get their first job, have their first kiss, graduate high school, maybe go to university, get married if they want to, have kids if they want to, retire comfortably in the twilight and slip away into the night, all without hassle or hurt.
When something goes wrong in that chain of events, that’s news.
Put that way, when I read about how the Premier of a mining state said the boom is the new normal, I went to talk to those guys who poured the concrete on the mining camps. When I learned how during the bust, retail spending crashed, I wasn’t interested in the numbers. Instead I wanted to talk to the oldest independent pawnbroker in Perth to ask what that means for the people he sees every day.
When I kept hearing resource economists repeat the same line that says the whole country is better off, I wrote about that manufacturing town which lost its biggest employer because the Australian dollar was too high. Economics, I find, tends to be something done to people, not for them.
Maybe I am wrong about some, or all of this. There are certainly other ways to do the work and I’m still learning. This is just how I think about what I do right now. That may change, but so far, I’ve found little people make for bigger stories.
Royce Kurmelovs is a journalist and writer whose work has been published by the ABC, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera English, VICE, The Guardian and more. Follow him on Twitter @RoyceRk2.
His most recent book Boom and Bust, a “dirt-under-the-nails look at the winners the losers and the impact of the boom that wasn’t meant to end”, is published by Hachette Australia.
