Writing short: It's about what you say

The wisdom of Donald Murray:"Brevity comes from selection, not compression."Me: Prune the dead limbs, then shake out the dead leaves.
— Roy Peter Clark (@RoyPeterClark) September 19, 2012

That is so true. I think when we talk about inch counts for stories -- I'm mostly thinking about projects or enterprise pieces, but it really holds for any story -- reporters can interpret that as quality reduction: If I could write 10 more inches, or 20, or 30, my story would be that much better. But if I can only write x-amount, my story's only going to be so good.

There are reasons to write longer, sometimes. But Murray's wisdom, as Clark notes, tells us it's not about the space you use to say something, it's about what you say in that space.

Dying man and his heart surgeon: A look inside the story

This piece was nicely done by Bill Landauer and offers a couple things we can take from it:

1. This almost wasn't a story. We'd written about Joe Palmieri and the heart surgeon before, and were reluctant at first to go back into the story. The fact that the doc's book was coming out was a bit newsy, but we certainly could've briefed it. But Joe kept calling Bill, and finally Bill said, "Why do you keep calling me?" or words to that effect. Joe's answer was a poignant one, that he felt like he was dying and was running out of time to feel like he had thanked the surgeon. That became the forward motion of the story.
2. The language and tone in it are an exercise in restraint. It would have been very easy for this story to be a maudlin tale of woe that would've felt forced or over the top. But Bill worked to pull back from that edge, and I think he succeeded. The story has the right feel to me -- emotional, but not blubbering. 

Making use of minor characters

At the end of Laura Blumenfeld's story in this week's Washington Post mag taking readers through Secret Service training, there's a note:

"Although a few subjects asked not to be identified, in most cases the Magazine chose to omit the names of minor subjects to make it easier for readers to follow the story."

This is a long story, a couple thousand words. Blumenfeld follows three trainees -- Krista, the 4-foot-11 former social worker, Dan, the new father, and Scott, the Iraq veteran who lost three fingers in combat. She also introduces us to their teachers, who have protected past presidents.

The trainees we don't spend much time with are only identified by their background: The Home Depot manager, a sky diver, the Tulsa cop.

I think it worked. Had the Tulsa cop been David Johnson, I probably would have forgotten who he was until I saw "the Tulsa cop" offset by commas. For a story with so much going on, I think it was cleaner. I think it makes better use of the characters. Of course, some would argue you're keeping something from the reader.

It's a damn good story. Give it a read, and let's hear what you think of the device.

Left unsaid

This piece was in the NYT mag this weekend.

It's a account of how a business reporter got drawn into the financial crisis. Once you get past the part about him being a reporter making $120,000 a year, there's pretty interesting storytelling here.

I don't want to say too much about it, because it would spoil the story, but a friend and I discussed the story at length Sunday. I'd like to see what you think.

Read the story with an eye toward the bits he weaves in here and there about his wife. Do you think what was obviously left out makes the story more effective? (I am talking about his second wife; the one he bought the house with.)

How I wrote the story: Jim Seip

If you've ever found yourself trying to write a story with seemingly no way to make it good, and you were about to give up, read on.

I asked Jim Seip to tell me a bit about how he put together this story about a Steelers fan who made a connection with some military guys who were also Steelers fans, and who went through a harrowing ordeal himself.

Turns out that Jim was in that box: He knew he had to write, and it was looking ugly.

But the beautiful thing is, Jim found a way out. How he did it is great inspiration for any writer who is stuck: Keep thinking. Keep turning it over in your mind. Usually, you'll find a sliver of light, a possible way out ... and then go for it. So, here is how a talented journalist pulled that off in this story:

1. I asked Jim how/when he chose to structure the story around a series of moments:
-- Decided late on the story structure. Real late. Stared at my screen, scrapped two or three horrendous ledes and went in another direction. Here was the main problem with this story: I felt like I didn't have a strong enough story to stand on its own. John was a Steelers fan, that's the reason we wrote the story, but he had so much going on in his life I didn't know how to start it or where to go.

My line of thinking went something like this:
* In the original e-mail from Chris I looked at the story and thought I was supposed to write a quick-and-dirty feach. Chris noted the guy sent tapes over to servicemen in the Middle East. First reaction: This story is going to be terrible.
* After talking with John a few minutes, it sounded worse than terrible.
* John had no contact with the airmen since he returned to the States. John didn't even know what service the guy served in during our initial phone conversation. I found out he sent the tapes about two years ago. So I didn't think that was a strong enough theme to carry a story.
* His mother sent us his contact e-mail and, oh by the way, mentioned he had a brain bleed. A BRAIN BLEED?!?!?! I didn't know what that was, so I asked: "Uh John, did you have something called a brain bleed?"
* He had some terrible health problems, but I didn't know what that had to do with the Steelers. He told me some neat little anecdotes about himself and the Steelers, but nothing fit together.
* News Flash: The Steelers didn't nurse him back to health. I really wanted that to happen so I could tie everything together into some nice little run-on sentences. I'm not proud about this fact, but I actually asked his wife if she thought the Steelers playoff run helped him -- at all, er maybe a little. (I had to ask right? And yeah, that was a stupid question. Her reaction let me know, even though she was nice about it.) The Steelers don't perform miracles. Now I know.
* So I'm sitting at my computer. I had nothing. Well I had a bunch of little stories, but nothing really ... WAIT A MINUTE! I had a bunch of little stories, er moments, yeah moments.

I thought using the moments in a quick-hit style might tie everything together. All I needed was a sentence or two at the top to let readers know where we were going.

2. I asked Jim what he wanted to accomplish by adding "for now" to "the story ends" near the end of the piece. The point being that he could have simply written, "the story ends" and moved on.
For now -- When I hung up the phone after interviewing John the first time I knew the story would end with the Super Bowl. It's current. It helps tie everything together. It explains about his improving health and it revolves around the Steelers.

I added "for now" because there was so much more I didn't add. I didn't talk about his first day back on the job. I didn't talk about how he's buying his wife tickets to go to the Hall of Fame ceremonies in Canton, Ohio, because her favorite Steeler is being inducted. It's a thank-you gift for her. I also thought I needed to add "for now" because he's relatively early in the recovery process. He's only completing half days at work. So I was sure there was going to be a lot more going on in his life in the coming weeks. But the big reason I added "for now" is because in the lede I talked about small moments. I sort of went over the top in explaining how the little stuff adds up to a big thing -- your life -- and how that's important. So I can't say the story ends, and the moments end, and the dude ends -- unless the guy dies. The article ends because it catches us up to date with John ... for now.

3. When I read the last line -- He returned to work the next day at FES Systems in Manchester, just another happy Steelers fan happy to survive a close call. -- I thought, that's a really cool way, almost a sideways way, to tie the subject's major health problem to the danger the military Steelers fans face every day. Turns out Jim was going for something else -- and probably better, more directly tied to the events in the story -- but he came up with something that works on several levels.

Close call -- Ha, ha! Totally didn't see that connection. But it does work that way. Wow.
I wanted the phrase to have more than one meaning, but not in terms of soldiers surviving the war. I wanted it to sound like he survived his health concerns. And he -- like other Steelers fans -- "survived" a close game. Over-the-top fans are the type of people who say "we" when talking about Steelers, and I just wanted to illustrate how John was up sweating with the rest of Pittsburgh when the Steelers -- I mean, "we" -- came back and won the game in the final minute.

A moment with Jack Hart: Meaningful detail

Anyone who has been to a writing seminar of any kind has probably heard someone advise writers to avoid the two sins of details -- using them for their own sake, just because they're in your notebook; or not using them at all.

I just read a passage in Jack Hart's book about that second sin that hit me right between the eyes. A lot of writers keep their distance from telling details -- to the detriment of their stories -- and it might not be your fault. And if you can unlearn something all of us have been taught, you can improve your writing.

Here is the bolt from Hart's book: "Our impulse is to observe specifics, reach conclusions, and report the conclusions. ... You're doing exactly what you've been trained to do. Modern education is all about inductive reasoning -- learning how to generalize from specifics."

Nothing's wrong with that, Hart says. But that's not what you should be doing if you want to tell someone a story.

Here's what I think: We're trained as journalists to dig out information and report it. We're almost hard-wired to conduct interviews, ask questions, and report -- in graf-direct quote-graf-direct quote format -- what we found out. So in many cases, when we see behavior or hear dialogue or watch a scene unfold, we are working so hard to figure out how to connect it to a larger meaning that we miss the fact that what we're watching or seeing or hearing is itself what we need to report.

That goes for a hard-news story just as much as for a true narrative. Our training, embedded somewhere deep in our heads, tells us to write, "'I will not vote for that,' the councilman said angrily," when we should write, "The councilman slammed his fist on the table and knocked his pen to the floor. 'I will note vote for that!' he shouted."

Our skill at including context, and at connecting that behavior or dialogue to the larger meaning of the the story, is crucial. But don't deaden your writing by figuring out what the scene or the behavior means, and then blowing off the crucial details to report only that the team celebrated joyously at midfield. Tell me that the offensive tackle was crying as he and the coach hugged for what seemed like a minute as the other players shouted and held their helmets aloft.

Again: You have to unlearn some of what you've learned, or at least teach yourself to think differently, to write like this effectively. You have to believe in the power of the right detail. You have to resist the urge to dilute telling details by assigning them broader descriptions -- and leaving the detail itself out. You also have to resist the compulsion of journalists to label everything with a descriptive tag.

A correspondent recently covered the Christmas tree giveaway at Helping Hands. He called me and said he was frustrated with his piece. For one thing, he said, he couldn't figure out how to describe the people who showed up to get trees without, he felt, being condescending toward them by calling them "needy" or some similar catch-all phrase.

I told him to forget trying to wrap them all up with a word. You don't need to do it; it doesn't add anything to the story. He read me a line in the story that said something like, "Some were out of a job, some were working but struggling to get by, some were homeless." That's all you need, I said. You've just used specifics of what you found out instead of a one-size-fits-all descriptor.

Although that's not the most stirring detail in the world, it shows that as a writer, you have to be conscious of what your choices are, and savvy enough to make the right ones.

From Hart: Before a reader can get to the same place you are, "they need to see what you saw, hear what you heard, and smell what you smelled. You must share your experience, not the conclusion you drew from it."

He quotes Hemingway: "Find what gave you the emotion. Then write it down, making it clear so the reader will see it, too, and have the same feeling that you had."