Alex Shoumatoff - Writing and Journalistic Techniques

Writing and Journalistic Techniques

Shoumatoff is known for his style of "long fact writing" which was a style developed at the New Yorker, which was edited by William Shawn, a practice still widely used there to provide detailed accounts of situations and to fill the weekly magazine's pages. Shoumatoff began "recording" everything that he was told, observed, or thought in over 400 red Chinese notebooks, filling some 70,000 pages to date. Shoumatoff says "the New Yorker gave its writers free rein, allowing them to choose what they wanted to write about, at whatever length they felt was needed." To this day Shoumatoff, in his commitment to giving the reader, to the best of his ability, "the full picture, in all its complexity and ambiguity", still writes very long, to the consternation of magazine editors at other magazines.

Most of his books, beginning with Florida Ramble, and continuing to his last published book, Legends of the American Desert, are comprehensive portraits of places (a state, a county, a rainforest, a desert), and often originated with a magazine article. They identify and present, in an easy-to-read mixture of travelogue and exposition, elements that Shoumatoff believes make the place the way it is: flora and fauna; natural, cultural, and political history; local dialects and belief systems. His writing is often characterized by a fascination with "the Other", disenchantment with the modern consumer culture, and an insatiable curiosity. According to the essayist Edward Hoagland, "admirably protean, encyclopedic, and indefatigable, Shoumatoff has the curiosity of an army of researchers and writes like a house afire." Shoumatoff also appeals to, frequently works with, and his work often crosses with, work in cultural anthropology and other specialists of species, culture, or music.