When I started out as a journalist, I had the makings of a very poor one. The pieces I turned in didn’t tell proper stories with a beginning, a middle and an end. And I guess – thinking back – they were light on information, even when they were a bit like field reports, about incidents or events.
This began to change when I was asked to write by more challenging editors. I remember when it happened. I’d been travelling on the rebel side during the war in Eritrea.
It was an independence struggle that set the Eritreans against the colonial regime – as they saw it – in Addis Ababa; it had complicated causes and took many serpentine turns. I believed it was important to explain all this. I felt the need to pack in information.
But when the editors got back to me, they said the historical stuff, the background, was too detailed: they found it hard to fight through my thickets of detail. I went over it again, thinning down, and trying not to travesty the story with too many shortcuts. They read it over and now they said they weren’t sure they followed: the path was certainly clearer, but it seemed bland and uninflected.
What were we to do? So I went back and started re-seeding it with thickets. After more to-ing and fro-ing it was sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction. One of the things I came to understand, as I began to write longer descriptive journalism, was that I had a very tenuous sense of structure: I really had none of the narrative prescience that shapes a.