Poynter, Roy Peter Clark introduce an app to help writers

For those of you with iPads, this is pretty cool. And the way it's structured seems intuitive to how you think when you're writing (and/or how you would ask for help).

What I learned: John Hilton on avoiding cliches

YDR staffers who won Keystone Awards learned about everything from blending in to dealing with roadblocks to having difficult conversations with sources. Religion reporter John Hilton's story about the result of a fire at a local church was part of a Thanksgiving-day series on people who were thankful even though they'd lost something or experienced a difficult time. It won first place in special projects in the Keystone Awards.

This story came about soon after an exercise on trite writing in which the entire newsroom participated. We were shown a photo and asked to write 150-200 words in the most trite phrases we could produce. Competitive as I am, I was determined to win the gift card at stake. And I can admit now that I cheated a bit, searching the web for trite words and phrases to boost my entry.

I didn't win the gift card, but I gained a new insight into predictable writing. To this day, I am thinking about that exercise with every story I write. I force myself to try new words and phrases and to avoid the tritest of the trite. Sometimes the results are rejected by an editor, but it's still a good learning exercise.

I love John's effort to avoid cliches even if it means trying a word or phrase that doesn't work. Why settle for writing the same old stuff everyone else is writing?

What I learned: John Clayton on trust

 The York Daily Record/Sunday News won 22 Keystone Awards in judging announced Thursday; many of those were writing/reporting awards, and by many different staffers.


I asked those staffers if they'd tell me, in 50-75 words, something they learned about storytelling (or generally about writing or photography/visual work) as they worked on the piece that was honored; or how they are trying to be better storytellers now than they were a year ago.


I'll share them on the blog as they come in with the hope that they create a kind of online roundtable about what we can learn from doing great work.


 Here's sports reporter John Clayton. He won first place in the sports story category for Stand strong, a profile of William Penn football player Anderson Novalin, who grew up in Haiti.

To me, this story reinforced the importance of trust. Anderson had seen some awful things in Haiti -- dead bodies, people being killed, etc. -- and he had to trust me before he was going to share them. I had to put in time ... Anderson was pretty shy during our first sit down. But over time he opened up, and I was able to get the important events/scenes that made the story work.

 An excellent point about earning the trust of the person you're working with to help make a story deep and true. Anyone else have a similar experience to share?

'Write as if you were dying'

This is kind of amazing. Chip Scanlan shared a link to author Annie Dillard's essay in the New York Times about  writing.

Some of you may be writing a book, I don't know. Most of you probably aren't; most of you are probably working on something for tomorrow's paper, or the next day's, or Sunday's or some Sunday down the road.

The essay is quite a read, although it would be tough for someone in a newsroom to apply Dillard's vibrant advice -- "What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?" -- day in and day out.

But there is almost certainly a piece within all of us that demands, and deserves, that kind of effort and dedication. Find it, and do it.

Little scenes, big meaning

 I posted below that I was looking for human stories out of Japan. I found a story this morning that wasn't about a person but a place: Onagawa, one of the many towns that got hammered by the tsunami.


Andrew Higgins of The Washington Post wrote about what he found there. The story includes this evocative graf, and the context of the piece invites you to imagine that this kind of scene is happening over and over and over again:


"To reclaim the world stolen by this gigantic wave, Kimura wrote his name on a wooden stake and stuck it in the ground to mark a pile of rubble as his home. Mumbling to himself, he smacked at the ruins with a cooking knife, hoping to conjure up at least some small physical connection with his previous life. All he’s retrieved is a small jar of mushrooms."


 And Higgins uses a great eye and sense of irony with the following line. He doesn't call attention to it (by saying 'ironically ...' or in any other way). He just writes it and lets it do its job on you:


"The first big building to be hit was Onagawa’s marine exhibition hall on the edge of the harbor. It remains standing. A big sign dangles above its mangled metal door: 'Images of the Sea and the Mysterious World.' "

Do you keep in touch?

A bunch of us were just discussing whether anyone understood what Quora was. I said I'd been trying for several weeks to figure out whether or how I'd use it, but hadn't yet.

After our talk, though, I got on Quora and immediately found that someone had asked Susan Orlean a question 'How much do you keep in touch with subjects you write about?' -- and that she'd answered it. So Quora has given me a blog entry. One point for Quora.

Orlean's answer was that she doesn't (though she's more eloquent about it). I love her answer, and how she explained it, because I've always felt guilty that I didn't keep in touch with people I did in-depth stories on when I was reporting.

 We all know that journalists move on -- there's always another story, always something else to cover. But still, you try so hard to make a connection with someone, to get to know them on more than a superficial level, and then after you've written the story ... you move on. It feels simultaneously inevitable and unnatural.

  Some writers, I know, do keep those connections. With one exception, I never could. Can you? Have you? How do you do it?

Writers (and more), gather

Poynter's NewsU has lined up a really good-looking series of webinars on all kinds of writing: short writing, narrative, social media, revision, writing for visuals/sound, and more. Great lineup of presenters, including Chip Scanlan, Jacqui Banaszynski, Roy Peter Clark and more.

These webinars will offer a lot to anyone from the least- to most-experienced person in our newsroom.

Check the right-hand rail for dates and times and I'll see you in the conference room. I'm sure these sessions will give us plenty to talk about.

Zinsser: Believe in yourself and in your story

Amy passed on this "excellent link," and it's good stuff: via Poynter, William Zinsser, author of "On Writing Well," checks in with some advice for writers (and, perhaps not so unintentionally, editors).

One graf caught my attention: "It’s natural for writers to worry about how their editors and publishers will respond to their work. But this preoccupation can be crippling. When we focus on what our editors want, we tend to tell the story we think they want to hear rather than the story we want to tell."

That probably resonates with a lot of writers in here, and should with editors as well. But here's the thing: Editors are never not going to have ideas about how a story might be, could be or should be done. I'd encourage writers to do what Zinsser says -- fight for the story you discover and believe is important to tell. Any editor worth anything should recognize and welcome a better story idea, and should go about the job of helping you do that story as well as it can be done.

Your writing voice isn't always right the first time. So, revise

Novelist Allegra Goodman (who, I discovered, has a lot of writing advice/tips on her blog) wrote about revising in a Wall Street Journal guest column. She talks about figuring out, as a young writer, the power of revising  your own work.Naturally she's approaching it as a fiction writer, but if you replace "fiction" with "nonfiction," what she says applies to what we do (and I think the last graf here really hits home...it's why so many people write leads based on advertising slogans and think they're being clever):

"Starting with inspiration and some talent, you could work to be a writer. You could keep revising, and improve.


"Why was this idea so surprising and liberating for me? Like many literary teenagers, I believed that art was a matter of instinct—that the artist's first impulse is the most authentic, that revision is something you do to essays but hardly applies to poetry or fiction. I pictured revision as drudge work, spoiling all that was fresh and original. But what if revision actually improved ideas?  ...

"...We grow up hearing that we should just be ourselves, and listen to our inner voices. But what if your authentic self won't shut up? What if your inner voice is boring? In revision you cut excess verbiage. Revising, you can experiment with other voices.

"It's great to tap into your unconscious, but remember how impressionable the unconscious can be, how quick to absorb the tropes of television and romance and life-affirming or cautionary memoir. Revision means testing and questioning conventions, forging a path through the cultural clutter that we mistake for our own creativity."

When you write, pay attention to small things; they matter

Where a word appears in a sentence can affect what the sentence means. Take this sentence from today's Washington Post:

Grosvenor, 79, announced his retirement before a standing-room-only crowd -- fittingly -- in the Grosvenor Auditorium at the Society's headquarters, just a few blocks from the White House.

 Because the word 'fittingly' comes right after 'crowd,' so, to me, what the writer actually said was that it was fitting that Grosvenor announced his retirement before an SRO crowd. That could be true.

 But what I'm betting the writer wanted to say was that it was fitting that Gilbert Grosvenor announced his retirement in an auditorium with his family's name on it. Had the word 'fittingly' come after the word 'in,' that's what the sentence would have said.

 No doubt some would say I'm being too picky. Please share.

Explanation fail

 You know how when experts give you a quote filled with jargon that you then have to turn into plain English if your reader has any hope of understanding what the person is saying? Mashable (apparently) attempted to do that when writing about yesterday's Facebook outage. Here is how the writer broke down what FB's engineer said:

 Johnson said the downtime today was caused by “an unfortunate handling of an error condition” involving an automated system designed to verify configuration values in the cache and replace invalid values with updated values from the persistent store.

What the ...? Does that mean anything to anyone? Granted, Mashable is a tech blog, and is probably read by tons of code-people who would ask what's wrong with me that I don't understand that. But to many people, that makes about as much sense as:

 Johnson said the downtime today was caused by “an unfortunate handling of an error condition” involving an ignoramus procedure designed to populate refrigeration cathedrals in the atmosphere and rejigger concomitant T-shirts with differentiated threads from the fiery earth.

 Couldn't Mashable have just said: Facebook said it ran a program to update information in its database, but something went wrong and too many computers tried to fix the problem at once and it crashed the system.

 I'm sure that's not exactly what happened ... but that's my point. The way Mashable wrote it, I don't know any more about what happened at FB today than I did yesterday.

A recurring theme

I saw this line in a wire story today -- Rendell said Thursday that if those differences persisted and legislators took no action on the bills in the next 10 days, he would be required under the state constitution to veto the hard-fought budget -- and, as I stumbled over what exactly a "hard-fought budget" would be, I figured I'd point out (not for the first time) about modifiers and why they're silly sometimes.

 Obviously the writer is trying to tell you, in two words, that legislators have really wrestled over this budget. But to me, using "hard-fought" to modify budget is a lazy and, when you think about it, ineffective way to do it.

I don't think a budget itself can be "hard-fought" any more than it can be "purple-tinged" or "foul-smelling" or
"mouse-quiet." You could describe the process as hard-fought, maybe. But why attach a modifier to it at all? Why not trust your reporting and writing skills and write a sentence that says, "Legislators worked 16-hour days and argued for weeks over spending cuts and taxes," for example?

It's the same as writing "tragic accident" or "uplifting victory." Just show the reader what happened. Those little modifiers don't do nearly the work we sometimes think they do.

The perfect touch

A good friend of mine forwarded me an essay about the late John Wooden by the L.A. Times' Bill Plaschke. "For your TMAS blog thingee," read the e-mail subject line. I suppose I can forgive my friend for referring to this blog as a "thingee," because the story he passed on is pretty damn good. It is, obviously, not something that was tossed off when Wooden died recently, but something that's the result of years of reporting, of being around Wooden (at least every now and then), of deep thinking, and of heart. It focuses on Wooden's devotion to his wife, who died in 1985. The tone of the piece is, I think, just about perfect -- emotional but not fawning.

A sample:

 ... in the middle of the bed, was a bundle of carefully scripted letters, all in the same intricate handwriting.
"Fan mail?" I asked.
"You might say that," he said.
The letters had been written by Wooden to Nell.
They contained humble descriptions of his day, gentle laughs over private jokes, eternal promises of his affection.
They had been written once a month, every month, since 1985.
They had been written after she died.

Wondering what to write about?

Washington Post staff writer Hank Stuever had this on his blog as part of a longer post about his return to New Mexico for a week recently. He talked to a group about writing, which is the context of what he says below. It's a fascinating bit of analysis and, really, advice. What do you think?

One of the things I brought up — which I still strongly believe — is that the best nonfiction stories (and probably the fictional stories and novels, too) usually come from the subjects that most worry, frighten or repulse the writer. And I think the most boring stories come from familiarity, when we set out to write about things we really love or are already in the tank for. I would guess that 90 percent of modern-day nonfiction, especially online, comes more from people typing about things they already believe strongly in, or hobbies they already have, or food and books and music and movies and gadgets they already get, understand and savor. The Internet won’t get much more interesting until people stop writing about what they adore (or are certain they despise, i.e., the other side of the political fence) and just go out and take notes on things they don’t know about, and are possibly afraid of.

A couple of good pitches

When Dan Connolly of the Baltimore Sun, former ace in our newsroom, recommends a story, you know it's going to be good. He flagged these two on the death of former Orioles pitcher Mike Cuellar:

• A column by George Diaz about Cuellar's last days.
• The Cuellar obit story by Mike Klingaman.

The obit story is better for baseball and/or Orioles fans because it's more focused on Cuellar's accomplishments with the O's. The column has a broader appeal: It is, basically, about friendship.

Vote on this cliche-with-a-twist

If you put a new twist on a cliche, is it still a cliche, or a fresh piece of writing? Here are the first two grafs from a story in today's New York Times:

"They were deaf, but they were not silent. For decades, a group of men who were sexually abused as children by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin reported to every type of official they could think of that he was a danger, according to the victims and church documents.

"They told other priests. They told three archbishops of Milwaukee. They told two police departments and the district attorney. They used sign language, written affidavits and graphic gestures to show what exactly Father Murphy had done to them. But their reports fell on the deaf ears of hearing people."

Like it? Don't like it? Why/why not?

No 'newsspeak' allowed

A radio station owner recently banned a list 119 of words.

They are mostly jargon, something we all try to avoid in our writing. It can be hard to keep that stuff out. I imagine it's an even harder habit to break for radio hosts.

The news director explained in his memo:

“The real goal here is to avoid using words that make you sound like you’re reading, instead of talking — that shatter the image you’re speaking knowledgeably to one person. By not using ‘newsspeak,’ you enhance your reputation as a communicator.”

In good fun, the folks at NPR put together a sentence using all 119.

I'm not sure that banning words is a good thing, but I see the point attempting to stop using words stuff like "close proximity" and "senseless murder." What's your most-hated phrase or word that you hear in the news?

Charles Pierce interview

Charles Pierce on writing, editing, stuff he likes, the end-of-decade narrative he did for Esquire magazine, and other things, courtesy of Neiman Storyboard.

Preview:

Q: What should a good story do?

A: I want the ideas to flow from one to the other. I want them to be surprising if they can be. I want the reader to go along in the same kind of evolutionary way, to have the themes strike them at the same point in the story that they strike me.

Fine reading

If you like writing, and you're not reading Tom Shroder's blog, you should be.

That's all.

Speaking of profiles ... how about Tiger Woods?

Gangrey.com linked to Charles Pierce's thoughts on Tiger Woods' crash-and-fallout, and that story included a link to a full profile Pierce did on Woods in 1997.

What Pierce reported for that profile led him to say this in his current piece about the crash and everything that's come after:

"I can't say I'm surprised — either by the allegations or by what's ensued since Friday's wreck. Back in 1997, one of the worst-kept secrets on the PGA Tour was that Tiger was something of a hound. Everybody knew. Everybody had a story. Occasionally somebody saw it, but nobody wanted to talk about it, except in bar-room whispers late at night. Tiger's People at the International Management Group visibly got the vapors if you even implied anything about it. However, from that moment on, the marketing cocoon around him became almost impenetrable. The Tiger Woods that was constructed for corporate consumption was spotless and smooth, an edgeless brand easily peddled to sheikhs and shakers. The perfect marriage with the perfect kids slipped so easily into the narrative it seemed he'd been born married."

Given the events of the past week, Pierce's 12-year-old profile of Woods would seem to be timely reading.