Doesn’t everyone dress in gold in 1977?
Tom Wolfe:
In an essay published in 2007, Tom Wolfe argued that the newspaper industry would stand a much better chance of survival if newspaper editors encouraged reporters to “provide the emotional reality of the news, for it is the emotions, not the facts, that most engage and excite readers and in the end are the heart of most stories.”
He said there are exactly four technical devices needed to get to “the emotional core of the story.” They are the specific devices, he said, “that give fiction its absorbing or gripping quality, that make the reader feel present in the scene described and even inside the skin of a particular character.”
The four:
1) constructing scenes;
2) dialogue — lots of it;
3) carefully noting social status details — “everything from dress and furniture to the infinite status clues of speech, how one talks to superiors or inferiors … and with what sort of accent and vocabulary”; and
4) point of view, “in the Henry Jamesian sense of putting the reader inside the mind of someone other than the writer.”
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 