Curiosity gets me in trouble on a regular basis, and it can also bring pleasant surprises. Whenever I act on my curiosity, I take a step into the unknown to achieve knowing.
What does that look like for my writing self? It’s the drive to learn as much as I can about a topic, person, place or idea. The better informed I am, the less I’m liable to paint a rushed, sloppy or distorted word picture.
Taking time to explore is not always feasible in the writing professions, particularly journalism.
These days, journalists must run faster on the hamster wheel than ever before…identifying, organizing, vetting and disseminating output from an astonishing volume of information. The goal is to get the story out double-quick, run it through spell check and keep it short so the reader’s attention won’t wander.
Besides the truncated research/writing time, most journalists must cope with formidable story budgets. From my perspective, that has been a contributing factor to the rampant “bothsidesism” in the media. Now that this approach has infested the communications world like kudzu, I’m even more glad of my decision to switch gears to blogging and books.
Bothsidesism is usually understood as false equivalency – the idea that representing “both sides” automatically brings balance and objectivity to a nonfiction piece of writing. However, when a writer assumes equal validity for each side and writes accordingly, the result is often misleading and inaccurate.
It was partly an aversion to bothsidesism that prompted me to deploy an extra measure of curiosity when writing my book Courage Says “Keep On,” about my grandmother Rachel Whitcomb’s experience as a settlement worker from 1913-1922.
The backstory of Courage Says “Keep On” is the settlement house movement during the Progressive Era. Settlement workers helped immigrants coming into the urban U.S. in the early 1900s. But they weren’t operating in a social vacuum; they brought their family backgrounds and cultural biases to the table, despite the socially progressive nature of the settlement idea.
My research strategy was to gather all the material that related directly to Rachel’s workplaces during the decade she was active in the profession. Then, my lens widened to include about ten books on the topic of settlements. Finally, I visited the workplaces themselves and conducted interviews.
At that point, I had a fairly comprehensive pile of raw material, and also a sense of how Rachel’s worldviews meshed with those of her contemporaries. I was then ready to write about a thorny aspect of the narrative: the differences between early 20th and early 21st century American attitudes toward immigrants. I felt that I would be able to do this without resorting to “bothsidesism.” To get to that point, I’d spent a lot of time immersing myself in the subject, and a lot more time noodling away on the best way write about it. The fact that a loved one was part of the story made me even more determined to portray her accurately and without judgement.
If I hadn’t been curious enough to spend time on minor nuances and details, I might have jumped too quickly from research into writing. In addition, there was another problem for my curious self to work on…I was missing about a year and a half of her story.
At one of the places where she worked, things didn’t go well, and for that reason, I had zero leads from oral family history. All we knew was that she went to a settlement in New Hampshire after spending six years in Boston. After a while I gave up and resigned myself to having a hole in the narrative—and then a clue turned up. While organizing notes and filing documents, I ran across some routine correspondence to Rachel from Vassar College, her alma mater. A stab of curiosity prompted me to contact the college—just as a research-related housekeeping issue to make sure I had all the available records. A few days later, Vassar emailed me some PDFs of standard alumni surveys. On one of them, she’d listed her work history, and there it was: the date and place of the New Hampshire settlement that I was missing. From that point on, I was able to trace the missing months of Rachel’s life through archives at the public library in Dover, New Hampshire.
Curiosity is like a door opening onto another door, infinitely. It helps me add dimension and insight to my writing. However…there’s an ever-present risk of being hooked into information pursuit and distracted from the goal. Unlike the other four traits I lean on in my writing life, this one is a little harder to manage for optimum results. My passion for finding stuff out can sometimes be an irritation to my loved ones, and it’s been a time-waster for me on numerous occasions. So I try not to get carried away to the point of diminishing returns. Still, when that little voice calls me to the wonderful world of wondering, I follow. Today, I wonder, tomorrow I write—or maybe wonder a while longer.
