Knowing the way to the end

Freaking cool story by Ben Montgomery of the St. Petersburg Times on a diver who went missing in a deep and dangerous cave, the people who looked for him, and what happened ... and what didn't happen.

The ending knocked my socks off, and it made me think of two things:

One, he didn't suddenly discover that ending as he wrote the last few grafs of the story.

Two, he didn't just tack on the ending when he felt like he was about near the end of the story.

I'm betting he knew where he was going from the start, and wrote with that destination in mind the whole way. And that's why it's such a great ending -- it's a nifty line or three, to be sure, but its power derives from everything that comes before it, everything that he reported, how he prepared/organized the story, and every choice he made as he wrote it.

Thoughts?

Hardcore investigative narrative

I've been reading this series from the L.A. Times called "Project 50: Four walls and a bed" about a program that inverts the usual theory about helping homeless people: Instead of working with the homeless to get them off drugs and help them get a job, then get housing, this program gives the homeless a small apartment in hopes that will help them overcome whatever else is wrong in their lives.

Christopher Goffard clearly did a mammoth amount of on-scene reporting for this, and you can imagine the tower of information (if not literal notebooks) he had when he sat down to write.

I admire a few things he's done here, and I think there are lessons to be taken and applied to many of the enterprise pieces we do or strive to do. These are things that you will hear about in many writing seminars, and I'll bet most if not all of you have heard them before. But it's important to see them in practice, and to try to deconstruct how they came to be the way they are:

1. There is a four-graf nut graf in part 1. But it fits seamlessly into the storytelling because of the transition from the scene, and because part of it is rendered as questions ... the very questions that led to the creation of the program, and the very questions the writer is telling you he's going to explore in the story. He's married investigation and storytelling here.

2. In any part after part 1 of a series, you have to clue the reader in to what's going on -- either to remind someone who read part 1 yesterday, or to introduce the story to a new reader. Look at how Goffard does that in part 2: A two-graf scene to open, a recap graf, then back to the subject in context of the whole project:

 To rescue the 50 people deemed most likely to die on the streets in skid row, Los Angeles County had a pragmatic plan: Give them an apartment and all the help they'd accept, requiring little in return — not sobriety, not meetings, not psychiatric drugs.
 Livingston and a handful of others posed the most extreme test of Project 50's premise. Merely living among others, with a modicum of structure and social rules, was proving a steep demand, considering what accompanied the hardest cases indoors: untreated mental illness and ferociously solitary habits formed by decades in the city's dope dens.
"If we can succeed with him — oh, my goodness," said the program's director, Carrie Bach. "If we can do him, we can do anybody."

 Scene-setting, intro of main character, tie-back to narrative story and establishment of conflict in the current story -- all in five grafs. Pretty good stuff.

     3. This is, as I said before, really an investigative piece at heart, but it never feels like one. It feels like a story. As it should. 

If anyone else reads this (or has read it) let me know what you got out of it.

'Narrative exhaustion'? Huh?

A screenwriter named Paul Schrader writes at length in The Guardian about a concept he calls "narrative exhaustion" -- people are tired of narrative storylines because they've seen them all before.

He thinks an average 30-year-old has seen 35,000 hours of narrative.

"That's a lot of narrative. It's exhausting.

What does it mean? For a storyteller, it means that's it is increasingly difficult to get out in front of a viewer's expectations. Almost every possible subject has not only been covered but covered exhaustively. How many hours of serial killer plot has the average viewer seen? Fifty? A hundred? He's seen the basic plots, the permutations of those plotlines, the imitations of the permutations of those plotlines and the permutations of the imitations. How does a writer capture the imagination of a viewer seeped in serial killer plot? Make it even gorier? Done that. More perverse? Seen that. Serial killer with humour? Been there. As parody? Yawn. The example of the serial killer subgenre is a bit facile, but what's true for serial killer stories is true of all film subjects. Police families? Gay couples? Corrupt politicians? Charming misfits? Yawn, yawn, yawn.

This becomes painfully clear to any writer who attempts to orally tell his story (screenwriting is closer to the oral tradition than it is to literature). You start to tell a story, try to catch the listener's attention, then watch as Ollie Overwhelmed packages your story and places it in a box. He has seen so much storyline that he has the boxes already prepared."

Well, um, yeah. But wouldn't this be better labeled as "originality exhaustion," or maybe "lack of originality exhaustion"? People are wise to cliche stories and are more likely to disengage.

But if the story is original in its characters, action, suspense, conflict, surprises, resolution and/or other elements, the reader (or viewer or listener) goes with you on the trip, even if the basic storyline is recognizable. That's the point. You may not be able to report on a storyline that's never been done before, but that story has things that make it unique. If you can find those things and write about them, you've got something.

Profile of a dying man

Edwin Shneidman was born in York and went on to be a major voice in suicide prevention, and in how our culture thinks about/talks about death.

We're not sure (yet) whether he lived here for any extended period of time, but in doing some rooting around online, I came across this excellent story about Shneidman facing his own death.

It's by Thomas Curwen of the L.A. Times, who you may remember has appeared in this blog before, related to a great story about a grizzly attack. He answered questions for us about what became a Pulitzer finalist.

This time the conflict is much more subtle, and thus more challenging to capture. Look at the way he puts you in the scene for the first several grafs, and then study the language and the pace he uses in the 10th through 13th grafs to tell you what the story's about. Thoughts?