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?

This piece could have been dry; it's anything but

This story, by Lauren Boyer about the Occupy York meeting last night, is one of the best-written news stories I've seen in our paper recently.

The writing -- from the lede through to the end -- is lively and original. It sounds like Lauren is talking directly to you, and you alone, the way good writing should sound.

But, importantly, the story doesn't bury the news (it's in the second graf) and never fails to deliver the news of the night: that the group is here, that it after discussion it settled on a name and that it decided what its first public effort would be. Excellent work.

Cliche-writing results are in, and the winner is ...

Will Hanlon.


Congrats, Will. Your $25 Rutter's gift card will be in your hands shortly.


I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on what you learned by doing this contest. I think we often use cliches because they come to us automatically (they're cliches, of course they do) and we don't push ourselves to come up with something better. Everyone who did this contest pushed themselves to come up with the most cliches they could -- and if you take that energy and put it toward replacing cliches with fresh phrasing, you're a better writer.


The judge was Skip Wood, formerly a reporter at USAToday for more than a decade who covered the NFL and other major sports. Skip and I have been friends since the day I walked in to the Harrisonburg (Va.) Daily News-Record's newsroom and he welcomed me to the sports staff there. He later worked for several years at the Richmond Times-Dispatch before going to USAToday. He now works at wjla.com/tbd.com in Washington, D.C., doing stories and a morning e-mail alert designed to set up the day for Washingtonians. He's on Twitter.


 We've spent the past couple of decades talking about anything and everything journalism, including amazingly good writing and insufferably bad writing. And he's one of the most entertaining writers I've known. So he has a keen eye for this kind of stuff.


I asked him to judge this based on who did the best job trying to write poorly, since that was the point. So if he's complimenting you on writing cliche-filled tripe, well, take it as the compliment it's meant to be. (One note on judging in case you were wondering: Some of you had headlines, some of you didn't; I asked him not to add or subtract for hed/no hed.)


Click 'Cliche writing contest' on the left rail to read everyone's entries. 


Here are Skip's comments:

These people are good. I mean bad. 
Here’s my take from each one, in alphabetical order:
--Buffy Andrews: Loved the fake name, first of all. ‘Buffy.’* Too funny. The clichés slayed. One after another after another after another after another.
--Joan Concilio: Just really, really bad. Loved “that aforementioned rain.”
--Will Hanlon: Smart. Just smart.  Not only that, but FAIRFAX COUNTY --
--John Hilton: Second graph nails it. Shot? What shot?
--Tom Joyce: I mean, you gotta love, “Bertha Muckenbaugh.”
--Bill Landauer: This was Gene Weingarten funny.
--Andrea Lazarus: The more you read it, the more you get it.
--Susan Martin: This is one of those stories you see sometimes when, oh, I don’t know. . . you’re reading a middle-school newspaper.
--Erin McCracken: “. . .strapped on his fishing gear.”
--Stephanie Reighart: Please. Just read the last sentence from the second graph.
Winner? Hanlon.
I liked it because it was written in the manner of a wordsmith who really thinks he’s a wordsmith when, actually, he doesn’t know anything about being a wordsmith. 

*This was Skip being his humorous self. I asked him about it and he said, "I was 99.99 percent sure 'Buffy' was, in fact, her real name."

Stay restless

Everyone in our newsroom has done good work. Even some great work. But nobody has done their best work. I believe that you have to come into the newsroom every day wanting to be better than the day before, wanting to push yourself toward your best work.

That's one reason I love the spirit of what jazz great Artie Shaw is saying here. He and his band had a huge hit with "Begin the Beguine" in the 1930s. In Ken Burns' 'Jazz' documentary, Shaw says:

"I still wanted to play music. And the audience was saying, 'Play what you're playing. Play the same thing over and over. We like that.' And they never could get it through their heads that what they liked was something I was doing on my way to getting better."

On short writing

Poynter's Roy Peter Clark on telegraphs, poetry, writing short, and, yes, Twitter. As usual, he has a great take on this, linking the art and utility of short writing through various forms and over decades.

Good warnings

I like this post from John McIntyre, former chief of the Baltimore Sun's copy desk, for a couple of reasons:

One, it's good for a couple of chuckles.

And two, it's always good to be reminded of the writing minefields that sometimes are only a step or two away. Knowing what territory to avoid can sometimes be just as helpful as knowing where you want to go.

Simple minds wander (subtitle: How poetry happens)

This morning I asked Kara about something, and she told me she didn't handle that anymore.

So I called her a slacker.

She responded:

Ode to a slacker
I am a slacker
'Tis true
But I learned all I know
From watching you.

Which, of course, meant I had to respond in kind:

I'm a mentor of slackers, it's said
Leading others to lessen their workload.
Were it not for your inspiration, however,
I'd be accomplishing things by the boatload.

The point of all this being, give yourself permission to take a creative break during your day, even if (perhaps especially if) what you're being creative about isn't for the YDR.

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.

The creative process, unwrapped

This is among my favorite all-time stories. I just rediscovered it online.

I love it mainly because I keep thinking about the writer, Walt Harrington, either assigning himself or being assigned the following: Write a story about how a poet writes a poem.

How the hell do you do that? How do you make sure you're there when the creative process is taking place? It's not like it's scheduled; you can't say, "Call me when you're being creative and I'll come right over." And even if you're with the person 24 hours a day, how do you get inside their head without your story coming off as an extended interview?

Well, Harrington did it. Read this story and you'll literally be there as a poem is born. It's a great piece.

Imagery and meaning

Here's a passage from a piece titled "Ramadi nights," by Neil Shea, who's a staffer at National Geographic, though this story ran in Virginia Quarterly magazine. What caught my eye was the way he used the rhythms of day turning to night to capture the state of the city, and what it meant.

"It is strange, looking back. At the time I didn’t feel any shift in the balance of things, though I’m told success was unfolding around me. Zarqawi had recently been killed, but that seemed to have little effect on the violent streets of Baghdad or anywhere else. There were only a few moments when it was possible to sense or grasp anything beyond the details of getting by. In the evenings, as the orange sun fell away and bats emerged from towers of the old palaces, you could feel the precariousness of the larger story, of the battle for Ramadi. It was as though, in the softening of the light and heat, a hidden view of the landscape was revealed. Perhaps it was that with dusk came a momentary peace. But then the acid night poured in, dissolving the edges of the city and reducing everything once more to small, irreversible moments of fear and action and inaction. It was in these moments that Ramadi was won, if it has really been won at all."

One page per day?

Now that he's released another book, novelist Philip Roth has given us a little more information about his writing process. In an interview with NPR, the author of "Goodbye, Columbus," "Immortality," "Sabbath's Theater" and a host of other masterworks said he puts in a long days writing.

On an average day, he produces one page. On a good day, maybe three. On a bad day, nothing. And that's one page before secondary revisions begin.

That floored me. Just think about the amount of copy you produce and the rate at which you do it. Perhaps it's why he's a genius.