Pete Hamill in Person

Pete Hamill, author of “Downtown: My Manhattan” (the book I wrote a fairly bored review of a couple weeks ago) came to speak with my journalism class today. My 10 classmates, professor and I took turns asking him questions about his life and work. And I must say, listening to Hamill was so much more interesting than reading his book.

I heard wisdom and awareness in the 73-year-old New Yorker’s stories of life as a journalist. He told us about everything from his experiences with love, to his take on the essentials of being a writer.

Born in Brooklyn, Hamill had a certain affinity for Downtown, “maybe because it was closest part of Manhattan to where I grew up,” he said. After he got out of the navy in ‘55, however, Hamill followed an itch for a change of setting to Mexico City College, where he studied painting and writing. And this is where his story got interesting.

“One of my teachers told me there are four stages,” he said. “Imitate, emulate, equal, surpass.” His teacher was talking about art, but Hamill related it to writing. He described a certain “cinematic structure” that can be seen in any good paragraph. He told us about rewriting a piece about a rainstorm to be about a snowstorm– going through it line by line so he could internalize its structure.

It’s funny, Hamill’s suggestion of repeating and emulating in order to equal and surpass reminded me of a cynical article I read on TechCrunch yesterday. The piece was about how Journalism school forces you into a style of writing “that a bunch of dinosaurs all agreed was acceptable a zillion years ago.” Listening to Hamill, I realized the balance lies somewhere in between. You can’t reject the basics of writing– a well written paper will always be a well written paper. But at the same time, if you waste too much of your precious time recreating the work of people who were acclaimed for being unique, you’ll find yourself lagging behind those that find their own way by just doing it.

While his original methods for success may seem antiquated now, Hamill embraced the developments in this field. “It’s inevitable; the delivery system [of news] is changing,” he said. “But journalism has to be the same– the quest for factual information.” In Hamill’s view, while the medium of journalism is changing, we still need to work to keep the Internet professional. “It’s not therapy, it’s not a hobby, it’s a profession.”

Beyond professional advice, Hamill also talked about thoughts on life, and one thing in particular stuck with me. He said that the 50s in New York were his favorite time. “It was that sense of God, I hope I live forever,” he said.

Here was a man who could look back and embrace his life– the mistakes, the successes, and most importantly, the search. I want to feel that way; I want to experience the city like he did, so I can stop at one point and think, God, I hope I live forever.