Name: Immersion
ISBN: 9780226113067

Ted Conover

Over three and a half decades, Ted Conover has ridden the rails with hoboes, crossed the border with Mexican immigrants, guarded prisoners in Sing Sing and inspected meat for the USDA. His books and articles chronicling these experiences, including the award-winning 'Newjack', have made him one of the premier practitioners of immersion reporting. In 'Immersion', Conover distills decades of knowledge into an accessible resource aimed at writers of all levels.

A Writer's Guide to Going Deep

Immersion

J. L. Askew

Conover has distilled years of experience and knowhow into this handy manual that is of benefit to all writers.
At age 22, Conover hopped a freight train, wanting to ride somewhere as a hobo, little knowing this starting point would be the beginning of a satisfying and rewarding career. Returning to school with the “field notes” he had taken, he found himself as a minor celebrity when other students began pummeling him with questions about his experience. He wrote about it in an article for the student newspaper which was reprinted in the college alumni magazine and before long he began receiving queries from national media. Soon Conover achieved the dream of aspiring writers, landing a book contract to expand his college thesis into a first-person narrative titled "Rolling Nowhere".
Preparing to write the book, he looked for materials and resources to guide him, but “in the end . . . . had to go it alone,” following the creed of some self-help groups, “learning by doing.” After publication, he began to teach while continuing to write as he answered students’ questions and gave advice from what he’d learned by his own experiences. Now, with "Immersion", he has written the book he wished he’d had when he first “set off to ride the rails.”
Conover covers all the steps necessary to embark into immersion writing starting with chapter one, “Why Immerse?”, which reveals the origins of the craft in ethnography, travel writing, and memoir. 
Subsequent chapters lay out the techniques and methods the immersion practitioner must master in order to gain access to a subject and gather the inside information that will become the finished product, a research paper, article, or book. Much of this work is pragmatic by nature and is done outdoors expending shoe leather. Yet even such non cerebral activity is revealed by Conover to be a creative exercise.
This book gives a lot of tips for the prospective immersion writer. For instance, when choosing a subject, “it [must] intrigue you. . . if the writer doesn’t really care about it, the reader won’t either.”
Also, “Imagine the [what you are to write] in your dream library.” Ideally, the topic will fit with current interests, “what’s on the news . . . what’s people talking about.” But as Conover shows, any topic can be made interesting if the writing is done well.
While intended for those “who want to write something of value that others might want to read,” "Immersion" is much more, a comprehensive manual for researchers and reporters wanting to plumb a subject deeply and write in a way that would touch a reader and reveal the interconnectedness of all humankind. The book outlines the techniques for “immersion writing”, a process that is at least half non-writing activity, raising a host of interpersonal questions having to do with ethics, morality, etc. Then the parts on writing speak of this special category of journalism that is closely related to travel writing, ethnography, and memoir. This type of writing is always looking “outward” not “inward”.
A hallmark of immersion writing “implies leaving home – or at least significant times outside it.” The writer must spend time, a lot of time, with his subject, being part of the subject’s life, involved with the attendant problems in that life. To be successful at these tasks, the immersion writer should have empathy. Like travel writing, the immersion practitioner captures atmosphere, a sense of place, providing the reader with an experience that is “deep and sustained.” 
Although immersion writing requires a lot of non-literary skills like interpersonal abilities, even in the chapters on strategy and tactics, Conover never strays far from the writing process.
He warns of the dangers of the first-person viewpoint for the immersion practitioner, “every on-site researcher changes the story in some way [the scientific principle of the 'observer effect']”. To soften these effects, Conover suggests “transparency”; “let’s be open and self-aware” about ourselves as the narrator. “Your ‘I’ needs to bring some value to the piece, or else it’s a distraction.”
While the topic of this book is a subset of journalism, in the final reckoning, all writing serves the same purpose, to instruct , inform, or entertain, and if done well, leaves the reader changed.
Immersion is highly recommended and belongs on the shelf alongside such classics as Forster’s "Aspects of the Novel" and Strunk and White’s "The Elements of Style".

Immersion A Writer's Guide to Going Deep

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