Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

I have always known my limits as a storyteller. For the life of me, fiction writing is a complete mystery. I love reading it, but I can't write it. I just don't have that narrative capacity.

And it shows when I try to do a reporting piece for Esquire, which Mark Warren inevitably ends up editing me heavily on: basically throwing away a lot of my stuff and forcing me to narrativize more, which I do very slowly and with great, unpleasant effort.

It's basically the difference between where I naturally excel (opinion journalism, Mark calls it) and where I am only so-so (reported journalism or narrative journalism).

And yet I go so many places and see so many privileged things, that's it's hard not to try.

Still, this effort has been a complete BITCH for me, and I'll be reluctant to try again for quite some time.

I am not Robert Kaplan although I can readily see the fun in his work.

Then again, I always feel bad when I'm deep in the bowels of a piece, so certainly I'm just taking this opportunity to whine on a bit while the whining's good.

In the end, it'll be a good piece. The process just lacks the effortlessness of my opinion journalism, which is another way of saying I put in something like 10 times the hours for maybe twice as much money. I have no idea how somebody makes a career working that hard.