The digs were a cliché, the view anything but.

As is our habit, though, we soon lost sight of the view, our conversation zigging and zagging from California politics to home renovations to copy editors we have known. (This prompted by my attempt to explain my research on verbs.) Pete remembered a New York Times rewrite guy who sent clouds “porpoising” through the sky. I recalled an LA Times lede that described a crashing DC-10 as a “cartwheeling fireball,” and a San Francisco Examiner headline that announced the resumption of capital punishment in California by relying on one verb, in the much-maligned passive voice: “Executed.”

Traveling the mysterious byways of true conversation, we then riffed on the evils of PowerPoint, noting how a Microsoft sensibility has invaded the nation’s newsmagazines—or what’s left of them. More and more stories seem to be conceived in bullet points. That tool of boardroom presentations and professional-development seminars is pushing storytelling out of lectures. It’s turning raconteurs into recounters. We noted that even travel editors—who once expected odysseyan journeys—now want “chunklets” and “charticles.” Web editors want links and search-engine optimization.

This conversation comes in a week when I’ve been struggling with an assignment from a favorite editor. He wants an essay in which I tell 1500 years of California history in 1500 words. How tempting it is to write a “roundup,” that glossy newspaper version of the bulleted list. I’ve been told to write a “capsule history”; how can I find the “story” and leave capsules to the medicine chest?

From swells crashing into the Big Sur coast, I develop the metaphor of waves of people shaping California. I found a couple of irresistible characters, and do my best to animate the story through voice. We’ll see what my editor thinks of my attempt.

Writing—no matter the length, no matter the venue—should always be a struggle. It takes time to synthesize a lot of information and find a narrative arc, and more time to let every sentence tell a small piece of a big story.

I’ve just posted an essay on literary nonfiction that attempts to help us think beyond PowerPoint. The ideas come from the three years I spent teaching writing and running conferences at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

We all have a tendency to grab for the easy structure—or, returning to the images of last night’s dinner party, to accept the neat corners of uninspired architecture and the easy certitudes of black and white. But how we need to gaze out the window, to contemplate the mysteries of the city at night.

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Ken Burns is hard to ignore—not just because his The National Parks: America’s Best Idea preempted PBS prime-time programming last week—but also because he has the chops and the resources to do great narrative journalism. I mainly agreed with Mary McNamara’s LA Times review, but while watching endless footage of razorlike mountains and verdant plains, I couldn’t help muttering, “Does it have to be so long?” “Could the writing have more frisson?” “Can Burns do tone that isn’t elegiac?”

As editor of the Nieman Foundation’s Narrative Digest, I once wrote a column called “Narrative” Is Not a Synonym for “Long.” In it I offered examples of some who write tight but still trace a narrative arc:  Charlie LeDuff, in “Frozen in Indifference,” published in The Detroit News, keeps his focus pointed and poignant. Matthew Parker’s “A Student of Intimacy, Step by Step” is one of many examples in the Modern Love column of the Sunday The New York Times. Another Sunday Times short narrative I hate to miss is Verlyn Klinkenborg’s, “The Rural Life.”

Touché to Burns for stretching our attention spans, but the dude needs a tough editor. Some of the footage is so familiar as to be predictable (like Marian Anderson and Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial). Internal repetitions need paring, especially when interviewees echo each other. Then there are the musical schemes, fresh in The Civil War but hackneyed now.

In one voiceover, a park lover comments on the “artistic restraint” of wolves in the wilderness. We all need some of that artistic restraint.

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