Reporting: Should Writers Be Journalists?

The worst thing a creative writer could do, it used to be said, was write journalism. By turning out facts to please the masses, he would supposedly debase his own style. But with so many writers, from Truman Capote to Norman Mailer, plunging into journalism. Novelist Thomas Fleming (A Cry of Whiteness) has taken the opposite view. A bout of journalism may be good for the writer but bad for journalism.

Because of today's declining market for fiction, says Fleming in this week's New York Times Book Review, writers are producing journalism to make a living—an advance over writing hack fiction or Hollywood scripts. Beyond that, journalism enables them to escape from their own introspection, the "feeling of feeding on one's own vitals, of using up and then repeating and restringing ad nauseam one's autobiographic experience." Journalism replenishes their experiences of the world.

But their kind of personal journalism has its dangers, warns Fleming. It is based on the "more or less tacit consensus of the intellectual establishment that objectivity does not exist. Hence the personal comment which attempts to do no more than state one man's point of view on a certain patch of experience." "Pure objectivity," he says, is probably an unattainable ideal. "But this does not mean that it should be abandoned any more than we should stop trying to tell each other the truth because an awful lot of people in this world are liars."