Mark Kramer > Quotes

“Is an ending really another beginning?”
― Mark Kramer, Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University

“Taking an idea, a central point, and pursuing it, turning it into a story that tells something about the way we live today, is the essence of narrative journalism.”
― Mark Kramer, Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University

“When I do interviews, I never take my subjects to a restaurant for lunch. It’s one of the worst things a journalist can do. Stay on their turf. Interview them in their world. If they say, “Now I’ve got to go and pick up my kids from day care and go to the grocery store,” you say, “Great. I can write while we’re on the bus.” I’m not just hearing their stories, I’m watching them live. I find my truth in the dialectic between what they say and how they live. You”
― Mark Kramer, Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University

“Over the years as your depth of knowledge grows you see more. The more you know, the more you see. The more you see, the greater your depth of understanding. Today the most dangerous world view is from those who have never viewed the world.”
― Mark Kramer, Armand Bayou Illustrated A Life on the Bayou

“You must choose, and choose aggressively. One of the most painful things about writing”
― Mark Kramer, Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University

“When you write, and especially when you write narrative, you create a sequential intellectual and emotional experience for the reader. From your perspective as the writer you are doing other things: describing an event, creating a record, imparting information, explaining that information’s source, or doing what my high school teachers called “showing your work”—as in “Solve this problem, show your work.” But whatever else you are doing, the fact remains: Your readers will have an intellectual and emotional experience as they read your work. If that experience isn’t pleasurable or exciting, they will stop reading. To”
― Mark Kramer, Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University

“Without the telling, well-reported detail, the narrative form is an empty seduction. It’s us listening to ourselves talk, falling in love with the sound of our own voices. How do you find those telling details, the earned facts, and then convey them? It involves two opposite sets of skills. While reporting, you must lose control so you can accumulate the facts. While writing, you must exert maniacal control over those facts. You begin by being laid-back and hanging out. Take the great inhale so that when you exhale, you will have among your notebooks that detail that conveys so much, so economically. Weave that detail into the warp and weft of your hard facts. A”
― Mark Kramer, Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University

“A friend once told me that I find my stories because I never learned to drive. It’s true. I take the bus. I walk around. By being out there—not the driver of my story but the literal and figurative rider—I have the opportunity to see things that I would never otherwise see. I”
― Mark Kramer, Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University