A Writers Day Devoted to Hard Facts and Good Stories

After a year in which the very definition of factual information has been debated around the country and world, NCS students heard Thursday from two women who devote themselves to producing work that is not only informative and entertaining but also intended to honor a reader's trust.

 

Students heard also from graphic novelist Gareth Hinds, whose adaptations of classic works by Homer and Shakespeare show how a good story can benefit from something more than text.

 

The sessions were part of NCS's annual Writers Day celebration, which also serves as the launch party for Half-in-Earnest, the school's literary magazine, and the announcement of student literary award winners, who read excerpts from their works. This year, those activities took place a day on Friday at an Upper School assembly. A day after hearing from professional writers, English department chair Paige Blumer '01 told the students, the assembly "acknowledged those in our community who are already making their way as writers."

 

Laura Meckler of the Wall Street Journal and Emmarie Huetteman of the New York Times are based in the Washington bureaus of their New York-based organizations. Huetteman, a congressional reporter, described her job as "just a formalization of what you do on a daily basis—gather information," and she boiled it down to answering two essential questions: What's going on, and is this news?

 

She described how she works with her sources, and she emphasized the limits of where those relationships can take her. She also told how the information she gathers must hold up to scrutiny and even skepticism if she and the Times are to maintain their reputation as a credible news source.

 

"We work hard to get credibility, we work hard to protect it," Huetteman said.

 

Meckler, a staff writer at the Journal, described a similar regimen at her paper of vetting the information collected through reporting. She also walked students through one particular story of hers that demanded considerable research and time talking to sources so she could fully understand the issues at play.

 

That article examined the proposition that the real divide in America is not Democrat vs. Republican but rather urban vs. rural. It's the sort of topic that a magazine might devote an entire issue to unraveling. Meckler had a little more than 2,000 words. "A lot of research ended up as one sentence in the story," she said, smiling, "but it was a very important sentence."

 

Meckler urged the students to set aside time to organize their thoughts, an important step that forces a writer to begin deciding how this story will be told. And then, Meckler said, finish a first draft—no matter how rocky it is: "I find 100 reasons to distract myself from starting, but I have to force myself to get something down. Once that's done, I find the revisions to be fun and easy."

 

Hinds recalled that, while drawing always appealed to him, creating comic strips as a Middle School student inspired in him a curiosity about storytelling. Hinds became a professional illustrator, working on video games, but he kept mentally coming back to the comic format. As a graduate student, he created an 80-page graphic novel based on the Grimm brothers' story Bearskin. A new career was born; Bearskin was the first of what is now seven novels.

 

"Each of my books looks a little different, an experiment I want to try," Hinds said. In King Lear, his characters escaped comic-strip-style boxes to wander around the page. He set The Merchant of Venice in modern-day Venice, and for Romeo and Juliet, he illustrated Shakespeare's cast of characters as coming not just from different families but from different cultures.

 

Hinds also showed students a bit of the process he follows to create each book, from researching the text and determining the narrative he will present to the sketches and digital rough drafts he creates for his publisher. Each book takes about a year to produce, he said, and his production timeline is fairly detailed, down to the number of pages he must produce each week.

 

In unveiling this year's HIE to the Upper School assembly, editors-in-chief Raphaelle Hupez '17 and Caroline Morin '17 highlighted the issue's design as reflecting the senior class's theme of Trailblazers, and they publicly thanked Ally Lorico '17 for her cover design.

 

This year's award winners, as announced by the Upper School English faculty:

Photos from Writers Day are in the Media Gallery.