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My background is magazine editing. I fell into the trade by accident in the late eighties, when I submitted an article to the Australian franchise of Rolling Stone in my first year of college. The article was a short, acerbic review of the local bands in Brisbane, my hometown. In my opinion, all the bands except one were total crap. What I neglected to tell the editors in Sydney was that I played guitar in the one non-total-crap band.

To my astonishment, the article was accepted and published without the usual rigors of fact-checking, and its publication kicked off a furious spate of letter writing from the Brisbane rock community. Brisbane was very much a cultural backwater in those days, so the editors of Rolling Stone were quite surprised to find themselves on the receiving end of a lot of passionate hate mail from a sleepy northern readership they didn’t know existed. To my knowledge, they published every letter.

At the time, I was studying journalism and law, and I knew next to nothing about magazine writing. What I did know was that I wasn’t very good at following rules, and that the “hard news” format of newspaper journalism was extremely rule-based. I had read lots of books as a kid, but following a seminal exchange with my mother (“Don’t play the electric guitar, Howard; it’s so common,”) I abandoned reading for guitar practice at the age of fifteen, and for the next three years, the only books I read were rock encyclopedias and biographies, the writing quality of which was sketchy at best. There were some exceptional works of rock journalism out there, but I was interested in information, not technique, so the idea of music writing as an art form didn’t really sink in until I was struggling to try to produce it myself.

Needless to say, my early articles were shocking. I blew more interviews with famous musicians than I care to remember, and I learned the dos and don’ts of interviewing the hard way:

ME (FIRST QUESTION): So Elvis, what do you hate most about journalists?

ELVIS COSTELLO: Fuckin’ stupid questions like that, for starters.

When you think Rolling Stone and rock journalism, the original point of reference is Hunter Thompson, but Thompson was a dinosaur in the late eighties. The music writing that was coming out of the States and the UK when I was in my late teens was invariably profile-and-thesis-based, and featured the concept of the invisible narrator. Whereas a Thompsonesque piece would deliver thesis in the form of Hunter staggering around in his own articles, ruminating obtusely on the nature of things, the meat of invisible-narrator journalism was delivered via the far more difficult practice of a writer accompanying subjects on some kind of adventure, and giving them plenty of rope to hang themselves with.

In profile-based journalism, “thesis” really only consists of two questions: Who? and Why? Who is Sting? And why is he this way? The simplicity/complexity of these questions gives a writer tremendous latitude to uncover and develop a thesis, based upon how deeply he or she wishes to probe the subject, combined with the time and access granted by the profile material. Thompson was an outsider, so he wrote from the outside, whereas the real skill of invisible-narrator journalism hinges on a writer’s ability to get inside a subject, and get inside fast.

The secret to getting inside a subject is that you need bucketloads of empathy. You need to cross the line between interviewer and interviewee in the first five minutes of interaction and make the rock star in the leather pants understand that your shit is just as interesting as his. If you can make this connection, it is then fairly easy to propose some kind of extracurricular activity in which you and your subject can “hang out” and “do stuff.” This is the rope. If the magazine you write for is sufficiently high-profile, you will find yourself accompanying David Lee Roth through a bunch of Vegas strip clubs, or shadowing Sting through the Brazilian rain forests, or watching Mike Tyson work his unselfconscious charm in a roomful of teenage supermodels.

If the first step is empathy, the second step is invisibility. You get so far inside the profile material that the person you’re interviewing forgets you’re there. And then the story writes itself. For no matter how hard your garden-variety celebrity will try to project a suave, united front, a public excursion plus ego will unravel it. All the invisible narrator has to do is be unobtrusively on the scene with tape recorder in hand, and possess the kind of analytical mind that can break down the complexities of human behavior.

Invisible narration is technically hard to pull off. Aside from thesis and access, you need to be able to paint a convincing picture of the subject matter traveling alone. It’s just the reader and Sting in the rain forest. The writer, like the documentary filmmaker’s camera crew, is nowhere to be seen.

Tom Wolfe championed this kind of writing in the sixties, but if you read his famous magazine pieces, he makes the classic mistake of getting bogged down in the reportage. At the end of the day, if you walk into a cake shop, you really don’t need to list every cake behind the counter. You’re in a cake shop. There are cakes. What makes the cake shop interesting is what the profiled is doing inside it, and whether, through the interaction of profiled and cake shop, we can somehow find the answer to “Why?”. More often than not, the answer won’t be forthcoming, so meticulous detail won’t save you. But interesting stuff goes on in cake shops, and the great thing about the flexibility of the rock press is that you could, if the longhaired gods of insight were to smile upon you that day, bang out a forty-five-hundred-word, entirely cake-shop-based article, nail questions one and two of the thesis, and have the thing published. All without ever using the word I.

Invisible-narrator journalism also happens to be a terrific boot camp for third-person fiction writing. I’ve never taken a creative writing class, but my friends who have go on and on about “fieldwork.” Getting out there, watching people, that sort of thing. For me, the big difference between the MFA and journalism schools of writing is that journalists are professionally expected to deliver the Why? whereas trainee fiction writers tend to focus more on manner and character. It’s one thing to go to a café and take notes on the couple having the argument across the room, but getting up, crossing the room, and saying, “So guys? What’s the problem?” requires the kind of intrusive personality that the vast majority of people are not born with. You have to learn to be intrusive, and there’s nothing quite like an editor/deadline/paycheck to help further the education process, especially if the editor is a monster, the deadline is yesterday, and the paycheck is desperately needed to cover your rent. Walking across the room becomes part of the gig. The fact that the girl is sobbing in staccato, mewling bursts or that an interesting blue vein is throbbing in the guy’s neck is beside the point. We want thesis. We want to know who these guys are and why they’re fighting. And if there’s money on the table and rent to be paid, we’ll walk across the room and make them tell us.

If journalists-turned-fiction-writers are steeped in thesis, the question has to be asked: “Where are the great works of fiction by the ex-journalists of our generation?” Thesis, after all, is an important and beneficial part of writing, and is often the make-or-break line between “entertainment” and “literature.” The answer, I think, is that journalists are trained to think inside the square, the square being the framework of the publications they write for. If you have a nose for a story, the story will write itself, whereas if you take away the story—if you say, “There is no story, make up a story of your own”—the absence of framework is a source of deep bewilderment for most journalists, as making stuff up goes against their training. You can be the most fabulous wordsmith in the world, but if you want to be a storyteller, you need to have a story to tell. A large part of Thompson’s and Wolfe’s early success was due to the fact that they broke outside the square (or maybe, back in their day, the square expanded to accommodate them), but if you read their fictive journalism—A Man in Full being a classic example—their narrative threads become untethered in the final act, and whatever thesis they were grasping for is buried beneath a lot of hackneyed, last-minute plot resolution.

In my opinion, the most complete novel by a former journalist in recent memory is Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, for the simple reason that the story dominates the research, and that the plot, character development, and research are impeccable. Harris is a former newspaper man, so his language is conservative, but he delivers continuous thesis throughout the book, mainly concerning the media’s culpability in fueling public fascination with serial killers and death. For all its brilliance, Silence was a straightforward, workman-like novel, and you can tell that Harris was thinking outside the square (story first, reportage second) when he wrote it, in a way that he clearly wasn’t when he wrote Hannibal. At the end of the day, when you break down the various components of fiction—story, form, technique and thesis—story is going to win every time, but I fiercely believe that the two strong suits of the journalism school, technique and thesis, are the key to the ongoing advancement of literature, and that the present convergence of media is threatening to make them obsolete.

Magazine journalism is not what it used to be. My friends in the business regularly complain that their publications are commissioning shorter and shorter articles, and that the length constraint really challenges their ability to deliver “atmosphere” and “mood.” Up to the point where the standards slackened and bikini pictorials became the order of the day, quality lifestyle magazines demanded a lot from their readership. They expected you to commit serious time and energy to reading them, and in exchange for this commitment, they rewarded you with exceptional writing. As a kid reading the great practitioners of invisible narration—Bill Zehme, Chris Heath, Mark Singer, David Kamp, Erik Hedegaard, Jon Savage, Tom Junod (before he went to Esquire), Rob Tannenbaum, Lynn Darling, E. Jean Carroll (before she got her TV show), Andy Darling, Jon Wilde, to name but a few—I was sufficiently inspired to sit down and try to replicate the various techniques I could see them using. In the majority of cases, the articles were long. To paint a really good picture, you need material and space, space being a rare commodity in the largely visual evolution of magazines these days.

An example: For over ten years, I’ve carried a sentence from an early Details profile of Christopher Walken around in my head. Walken is in a downtown café, giving (almost but not quite) invisible narrator Erik Hedegaard the spooky treatment. The experience has been unsettling, so Hedegaard writes, “Fiddling with his lemons, he seems to repel conversation.” Which nails Walken, the interview, the moment in the café. It’s an irreverent break, but it works, and the reason it works is that the writer has been given enough space in the article to develop the kind of atmosphere that can accommodate this thought. If you tried to condense an observation like this without the requisite three pages of skillful framing, it wouldn’t make any sense. But we’ve traveled with Walken. We have a sense of his mood. And thus a technique- and thesis-rich sentence is able to convey an uncanny snapshot of a subject in a way that the new trend of big-photo/small-caption magazine journalism cannot.

What I am talking about here is craft. The colorful nature of the celebrity industry really lends itself to colorful writing, and the tangible word length of magazine articles is such that an aspiring writer can sit down and study the craft in bite-sized pieces. But if the pieces become too small, there will be nothing left to study. I’m not suggesting that lengthy feature writing will ever become extinct: The New Yorker and Harper’s and Vanity Fair will see to its survival. But the thing is, I wasn’t reading those magazines when I was in my late teens. I was reading Rolling Stone and Details. I was a kid, and in much the same way professional athletes, actors, artists, and musicians develop a love of their profession in their formative years, I fell in love early with writing, courtesy of a rock and lifestyle press that took itself seriously, and a collection of young writers who strove to make an art form out of magazine journalism.

In terms of my own evolution, I traded rock journalism for sportswriting, sportswriting for editing, and then I jumped ship to fiction and haven’t looked back since. But I still read magazines—both on- and offline—and to my eye, the youth end of the market has become disturbingly lightweight. Articles are shorter and tend to be more sensational than insightful, and I’m not seeing much in the way of room crossing and empathetic intrusion. What I am seeing is a lot of blithe conjecture and hip phraseology—“The couple across the room are arguing. The couple across the room are dorks”—which is a poor substitute for the hard-won intelligence that thesis journalism can provide.

I’m at an age now where I read the twenty-thousand-word articles in the New Yorker as a matter of course (and aspire to writing one or two myself), but I often wonder whether this would be the case had I been born ten years later. I was a magazine worm, not a bookworm, and a sucker for music-driven pop culture of any kind, but if my teenage information sources were Web- or T&A-based, I might have fallen in love with some of the models in the magazines, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have fallen in love with the writing.