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WHAT IS LITERARY
JOURNALISM?

LITERARY JOURNALISM

A type of creative nonfiction known as literary journalism is a form of journalistic expression that blends
factual reporting with narrative devices and stylistic devices more commonly found in fiction
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A literary journalist immerses
himself into his/ her subjects’ world so as to explore and thereby narrate it empathetically
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A literary journalist mostly (not necessarily) deals with routine events affecting the lives of individuals
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In order to ensure accuracy and precision of
data, the journalists have to conduct research by exploring the case studies, surveying, conducting
interviews, observing the available sources of data, reading the historical records along with seeking
the other theoretical and analytical means of providing information
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The origins of literary journalism can be
traced in the works of Daniel Defoe (in the 18th century) Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway
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Literary journalism focuses on it plotline, the art of characterization, dialogue, vivid scenes, conflicts,
and the other essentials as focused by the writers of creative nonfiction
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NORMAN SIMS AND LITERARY JOURNALISM
Norman Sims (1948-2022) was a professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Massachusetts
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Mentioned below are the
selected extracts from his work entitled The Literary Journalists
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Like hounds by the dinner table, they have waited for scraps of
information to fall from Washington, from New York and from their beats at the court
house, city hall, and the police station
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Readers deal in their private lives with psychological explanations for
events around them
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The everyday
stories that bring us inside the lives of our neighbors used to be found in the realm of
the fiction writer, while nonfiction reporters brought us the news from far-off centers
of power that hardly touched our lives
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Reporting on the lives of people at work, in
love, going about the normal rounds of life, they confirm that the crucial moments of everyday life contain great
drama and substance
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Literary journalists follow their own set of rules
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The voice of the writer surfaces to show readers that an author is at
work
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Characters in literary journalism need to be brought
to life on paper, just as in fiction, but their feelings and dramatic moments contain a special power because we
know the stories are true
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Literary journalism draws on immersion, voice, accuracy,
and symbolism as essential forces
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Many of the New Journalists such as Tom Wolfe and Joan Didion have
continued to produce extraordinary books
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And now there has appeared a younger
generation of writers who don’t necessarily think of themselves as New Journalists, but do find immersion, voice,
accuracy, and symbolism to be the hallmarks of their work
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Some people in my trade—I’m a
journalism professor—argue it is nothing more than a hybrid, combining the fiction writer’s techniques with
facts gathered by a reporter
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But the motion picture combines voice recording with the photograph,
yet the hybrid still deserves a name
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Standard reporters, and some fiction writers, were quick to criticize

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the new journalism
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It was flashy, self-serving, and it violated the
journalistic rules of objectivity
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Today’s literary journalists clearly understand the
difference between fact and falsehood, but they don’t buy into the traditional distinctions between literature and
journalism…
As a reader, I react differently to literary journalism than to short stories or standard reporting
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Should I discover that a piece of literary journalism was
made up like a short story, my disappointment would ruin whatever effect it had created as literature
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Whether
or not literary journalism equips me for living differently than other forms of literature, I read as if it might
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Through their eyes, we watch ordinary people in crucial contexts…These authors understand and
convey feeling and emotion, the inner dynamics of cultures
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But, unlike such academics, they are free to let dramatic action
speak for itself…By contrast, standard reporting presupposes less subtle cause and effect, built upon the events
reported rather than on an understanding of everyday life
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EXAMPLE OF LITERARY JOURNALISM
Linda Tutmann_ July 2018

THE IDEA FROM A REVOLUTIONARY YOUNG PRIEST
Story of Hutus and Tutsis (the two cultures) involved in the 1994 Rwandan genocide that took millions of lives
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The village owes its
fame to a fact that was unbelievable when it was first founded: in Mbyo, Hutu and Tutsi, perpetrators
and families of victims, live next door to one another
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“How can we be ever be happy again in
this country?” he asked himself, and he knew: Forgiveness was the
only answer
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They were Hutus
who, in the meantime, had been sentenced to prison terms by the
new
government
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“He is a Tutsi! We should kill him
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“Let him talk,” they agreed
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”
This man is Bishop Deogratias Gashagaza; he calls himself Bishop Deo
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Every two weeks, he went back to the prison and talked to the men about their crimes, about God and
his faith, and he read the Bible with them
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“They learned
to trust me
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Will hatred swell up in them again?
He wanted to create a place where Hutus and Tutsis could extend a peaceful hand to one another
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Today, he is guiding a tour of the village
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There’s a school, children play together, and in the evenings, they all sit together and
sing Rwandan folk songs
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Everything seems
peaceful
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Eerily calm
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” Whether they are Tutsi or Hutu
no longer matters, they say
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bosch-stiftung
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Ruth Pfau (1929-2017) came to Karachi from Germany and spent her life working to eradicate leprosy
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Ruth Pfau sitting under an old banyan tree in Manghopir, it reminded me of a
childhood story told by my great grandmother, Babi
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She was saved by an old woman who sat under a banyan tree along the Ganges, surrounded by the
outcast widows, young and old
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She was their psychiatrist, their spiritual leader and, above all, their only hope,” Babi
would narrate
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Ruth Pfau sitting and knitting under a banyan tree in the
hilly area of Manghopir, a poor neighbourhood of Karachi
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The clawed hands and feet, the wounds, the
deformities didn’t faze Dr
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She shared meals with them, shared jokes with them in her broken
Urdu, and they called her Amma
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I had just entered the world of journalism,
though the newspaper I was with, The News, had not yet launched
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Dr
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“I saw the bombardment, witnessed the cruelties
and inhumanity
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” Leaving behind her hometown Leipzig in former East Germany, she crossed
the border into France to study medicine and went on to join the Church as a nun
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Dr
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“Outcast, alienated, in miserable conditions without

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any medical facilities, and without normal human interactions,” she said
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”
She made Karachi her home and built the Marie Adelaide Leprosy Centre or MALC in Saddar, and a
destitute centre and orphanage in Manghopir
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It was like traveling in a vast desert all alone but later, as people joined in and
supported, it became a caravan and, this place, an oasis,” she told me
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She could tell that
their severe deformities and physical closeness to me was making me uncomfortable, but she wanted
me to see beyond their physical condition
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“That’s how you change societal
behaviours
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There was to be a wedding
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Dr
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Their deformities were irrelevant as everybody danced and sang;
there was immense happiness all around at the centre
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She expanded her medical work, from the port city of Karachi to the deserts of Thar to the mountainous
region of Gilgit Baltistan and Azad Jammu & Kashmir
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“No hurdles for Amma
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They first thought I was Pashtun,” she laughingly said
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They all considered me as a Pakistani rather than a German
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”
I inquired if she had any regrets
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“If I were to be
reincarnated, I would like to be in Pakistan again
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Pfau travelled extensively in Afghanistan, even during the Cold
War and later during the infighting between the Mujahideen
groups
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Be it Hekmatyar or Ahmed Shah Masoud, I would cover my
head, sit with them and have qahwa
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They knew
I had no agenda other than serving people with medical facilities
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Pfau was in critical condition and the ventilator was being removed
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I didn’t have the courage to peep through the glass to see her
one last time
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in/)

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