In the last few days, I wrote about pitching the feature story I'm doing on the adult movie industry and the process of starting to assemble the story itself. Today, the engine started making chugging noises and the wheels began to turn.
There were a lot of emails and telephone calls. So far, things have been going well. The important sources are proving interested, which is like having a gate opened into a garden that you wanted to go into and in which you hope to find Alice, and the ones I expected to be assholes are being assholes, so I'll likely avoid them.
As I go along, I compare some of this process to what it was like when I covered the adult movie industry for the first time over a decade ago. In a way, things are a lot the same. At the same time, they're different. People are more media-friendly, which is good. For the reporter. And the shitload of content on the web makes everything easier. No more stacks of adult video cassettes stored in closets and drawers.
You also don't have to work so hard to make the fucking point -- to, say, an editor, or, say, a reader (or, say, you). Most (many? some?) people see porn as either ridiculous or interesting (both of which are correct), and more people, it seems, agree there is at least something in it work talking about. And that's what writing is. Talking made fancy.
I'm contacting a variety of different types of players. The idea is that you set up a scene, a situation, a world into which you will enter, and then things never go as you planned, something else happens, and you pray to God that whatever that is is a blessing, or a curse, but in either case is something that you can use.
One of the agents I've had in the last few years encouraged me to read The New New Journalism, a collection of interviews with some of "America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft." It includes a wonderful interview with Gay Talese, who wrote one of the best profiles ever written.
He's asked: "And how do you decide whom to interview?"
I don't know who the characters are at the beginning, I don't know the story, but I do know the stage of the theater. I find the characters by simply showing up at the "theater." As I spend more time in there, they emerge. It's almost as if I imagine them, and then, they mysteriously appear.And that's exactly how it happens. You wait for divine grace and hope you do whatever one is supposed to do to deserve it. After that, you write it all down.
