How to become a better reporter, writer? Start here

If you read this -- Roy Peter Clark has brought back around his 1979 assessment of why Richard Ben Cramer was so damn good -- you will see, in Clark's list of Cramer's qualities, everything you need to be good at and be better at in order to become the best reporter and writer you can be.

You could write a book about this, as many people have. And there are a lot of good ones out there. But sometimes it helps to see it broken down like this, succinctly. After that it's up to you and me.

I read something this morning and felt like I'd received a gift

I read a lot. And I read a lot of personal writing -- essays, columns or first-person accounts of something or other, stuff like that.

And I like to think that I recognize honesty in that type of writing, and can gauge when someone's going through the motions, or trying but not really getting there, or unreservedly opening themselves up and standing before me, the reader.

But every now and then I read something that makes me realize I give a lot of writers a pass. I read something that is so bracing, so true, it's pleasantly startling. It is a gift from the writer.

This morning I read Steve Navaroli's column, "Taking a break to battle cancer." Steve, a YDR sports staffers, writes columns as part of his job. But he's never written one like this.

I know Steve as part of our staff here; he's universally known as a good guy. I don't know him well personally.

But I know him better now. Through his act of writing, of honesty and with a perfect sense of an emotional moment, he gave me that gift.

Thanks, Steve. Count me among those looking forward to your return.

An ex-Marine reflects: Two stories in one

As part of the national online project American Homecomings, photographer Kate Penn and columnist Mike Argento are following West York's Darnell Rias for a year as he builds his post-war life.

Recently, Kate and Mike went with Rias to Camp Lejeune, N.C., where Rias welcomed home his good friend, Lance Cpl. Harley Philhower.

Because I'm working with Mike on the text version of the story, Kate's video is always fresh to me. I'm always fascinated at how a writer and a visual artist work together-but-separately -- they're on assignment together, so there's a teamwork aspect to it, but neither wants to tell exactly the same story as the other.

In this case, Mike's story focuses on the (mild) suspense of Rias meeting Philhower, exchanging scenes of anticipation with background that fills out the military friendship part of their story. Kate's video has the reunion, too, but it left me thinking about how wistful Rias is when he's talking about his time in the Marines (even when he talks about feeling like he had to cut his hair to go back to Camp Lejeune).

They are complementary pieces, each of which tells an important part of Rias' story.

Finding an ending when the ending isn't obvious

Houston Schwartz watches as his father, Matt, gives him Tylenol.

This package by YDR staffers Leigh Zaleski and Chris Dunn is one of the best art/story packages we've published this year.

There's a compelling storyline, evocative photography and writing that deftly navigates that space between maudlin and clinical.

From the opening of the story:

Matt Schwartz sat in a mahogany rocking chair in his mother's basement in April, leafing through a 3-inch binder of medical papers.His son Houston, then 5 months old, lay next to him under bee-and-teddy-bear mobiles in a light wooden crib. A bag of formula hung beside the baby on a metal IV pole and fed him through a tube directly into his stomach. A scar on his chest marked where his ribs were cracked during two open-heart surgeries.
He weighed 8 pounds 4 ounces, half of what he should for an infant his age. Breathing tubes clung to his face. A glowing red light, taped to his left foot, monitored his pulse.
A poster on the wall detailed how to give an infant CPR.
Sunlight and signs of spring peeked through a small window, shining life on Houston in the dim room lit by two fluorescent bulbs.

One of the challenges of the story was how and where to end it. In many cases, a story like this ends when the child dies or is cured (even if temporarily). In this case, we knew neither of those were likely to happen during the time frame we had set for our story to run.

So, Leigh wrote an ending that showed Matt Schwartz pulled between his desire to do everything he can to keep his son alive and the knowledge that at some point, he will have to stop. Once Leigh had that ending, there was the question of: How do we give people the very latest information on Houston and Matt? We settled on the epilogue -- spare but, we hope, in keeping with the emotion of the piece.

'Is this your first Kinkade?'

Some things just blindside me. For example, an artist named Thomas Kinkade just died. This was apparently big news. And in one of the stories, I read a line that said it was estimated that a Kinkade painting was hanging in one of every 20 U.S. homes.

I'd never heard of the guy. 

So naturally, when a Susan Orlean profile of Kinkade from 2001 showed up in my Feedly, it became my lunchtime reading.

What a reward. Orlean's use of detail and dialogue creates a profile of Kinkade before you actually meet him in the story. And when you do meet him, she lets him characterize himself with long, interview-y quotes that might not work were they not set up so well. 

But the greatest parts, I think, are Orlean's descriptions. A gallery, she writes, is set up to make you feel like "you had entered Thomas Kinkade's world, where it is always a dusky autumn evening in a small but prosperous English town."

 Kinkade paintings, she writes, are difficult to tell apart "because their effect is so unvarying -- smooth and warm and romantic, not quite fantastical but not quite real, more of a wishful and inaccurate rendering of what the world looks like, as if painted by someone who hadn't been outside in a long time."

 Of Kinkade himself, she writes: "If you see his paintings before you meet him, you might expect him to be wispy and pixie-like, but he is as brawny and good-natured as the neighborhood butcher. He has the buoyant self-assurance of someone who started poor and obscure but has always been sure he would end up rich and famous."

Go read for yourself. It's time well-spent.

Writing that makes you swoon

This has to be one of the best passages of writing I've read in long time. It's from Chris Jones' piece in Esquire about the Zanesville, Ohio guy, Terry Thompson, who let his exotic animals loose and then killed himself. Just the precision in the reporting and writing is amazing here, especially in the middle paragraph of these three.

The story starts with the landowner next door Sam Kopchak, who went out into his field to get his horse Red in for the evening, and first saw Thompson's horses acting strangely, then saw a bear chasing them, and then:

Now he approached Red, reaching out with his bucket of water, calling to him gently. Red nosed in for a drink, and Kopchak got a rope on him. He put down the bucket and began to lead his horse back toward the barn. He'd covered maybe twenty or thirty yards, Red bouncing a little, pulling at his rope, when Kopchak suddenly felt a shiver go over him. "I can't really explain it," he says today, "except to say that I felt like I was being watched." He looked back toward Thompson's band of horses; the bear was pushing them north, toward the highway. Then Kopchak saw the lion.

It was a male African lion, with a great golden mane. "It was just enormous," Kopchak says. The lion was to his left, feet rather than yards away, pressed against that thin wire fence. It was lying flat on the grass with only its giant head lifted up, and it had been watching Kopchak walking down the hill. The lion was looking dead at him. Kopchak let out a breath and fixed his eyes straight on his barn, still more than a hundred yards away. He made two decisions: He would not run, and he would not leave Red. He would walk, as calmly and as steadily as a sixty-four-year-old retired schoolteacher being watched by a lion could manage, all the way back down to his barn.

Kopchak looked back only once, and the lion returned his stare. It had also risen to its feet. The fence had seven strands of wire strung between its wooden posts; the lion's back ran parallel to the second strand from the top. Kopchak continued to walk down the hill. Each push into the mud felt slower than the last. Finally, he opened the barn's big sliding doors and stepped inside with Red in tow; he closed the doors with a clang and felt his shoulders slump a little. He put Red into his stall, and he reached into his pocket for his cell phone. Reception wasn't good. He stood in a corner of the barn closest to the house, and he called his mother. He told her that he was inside the barn, and that there was a bear and a lion outside the barn, and she needed to stay inside the house. She also needed to make a phone call.

Longreads' Top 10 of 2011

Guaranteed to be good, y'all. Here you go.

Penn State: The week that was, captured by two fine writers

In case you missed it in any of the other places I've posted links to these stories, I'd put these two pieces up against anything anyone has written about what happened last week at Penn State:

• Frank Bodani's story about the game and what it meant on a deeper level
• Mike Argento's story about the fans, the university and the alumni who are mourning the Penn State they knew and are beginning to move on

Two great stories. One's a little better. Why?

I had this Twitter conversation yesterday and thought I'd share because in just three tweets, Andrea Pitzer of Harvard University's Nieman Foundation really got me thinking about the differences between these two fantastic stories by Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post.

One is "The Peekaboo Paradox," about a children's entertainer with a secret. Pitzer called it the best story he's written. And, she wrote, Weingarten agreed it was his best. That immediately made me think of "Fatal Distraction," Weingarten's haunting story about parents who forget their children in the backseat of locked cars on hot days. I wondered why Pitzer and Weingarten thought Zucchini was better than 'Distraction,' and she broke it down. Here's the conversation (and the point of this post is mostly in our mutual agreement at the end -- if you have not read each of these stories, you must).

If you read just one thing about Sept. 11 as the 10th anniversary approaches ...

 I just sent this link to a writer who hadn't read it, and, with the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 coming up, I figured I would post it here.

 It's Tom Junod's story in Esquire, "The Falling Man," in which Junod reports to find out who the man is in an iconic picture from Sept. 11 -- a man who jumped, or is falling, from one of the World Trade Center towers.

 The story, as you'll see, ends up being about so much more than identifying the man in the picture.

 I wouldn't be so bold as to say it is the only thing you ought to read as the anniversary approaches, but if it is the only thing you read, it will stand for everything else about that day.

Frank Bodani on Rosey Grier and what really matters

Randy called this column by Frank Bodani to my attention, saying it was an example of great work by Frank. He's right.

I doubt Frank set out to write a column about how Rosey Grier is dealing with the recent death of his wife. But he didn't miss the chance when it presented itself.

'Girl in the window,' three years later

This was an incredible story when it came out -- a seven-year-old girl neglected to the point that she could not connect with other human beings -- and three years later, it still is.

The follow-up is beautifully written and shows the girls signs of progress. The then-and-now photos are remarkable.

New stuff here. And it's good stuff.

 I did something long overdue: I've added several examples of excellent storytelling by YDR staffers to the blog.

 Under "YDR documentaries" (see link at left) you'll find Paul Kuehnel's video about a woman who, as a 3-year-old, witnessed her mother's murder and visits the scene 39 years later.

 Under "YDR success stories" you'll find Mike Argento's piece about that woman. You'll also find two other great pieces by Mike -- one about a medal of valor winner, and one about a couple whose health forced them to part after decades of marriage.

 There are other great reads there, too, including "Her wild life," Frank Bodani's piece about a legendary exotic animal rehabilitator who, with age, has had to give up most of her animals.

 Check 'em out.

Costumed crusaders save the day! (Seriously)

Must read: Jeff Frantz's piece on two guys who dress up in superhero costumes, call themselves the Keystone Crusaders and go around Harrisburg -- a city more or less in freefall -- cleaning graffiti and dog crap, giving water to the homeless, helping out people who need help and doing whatever else urban despair-fighters might do.

A snippet:

They begin — as they have at least twice a week since March — in the Market Street tunnel. 
    
“Good Morning!” they bellow, warming up their superhero voices to the office workers walking west, and the residents heading east. 
    
How can anyone, Commonwealth asks, feel good about their city if their first sight of it is this cavern of filth? 
    
The battle is joined, and Commonwealth’s three utility belts/fanny packs, come open. 
    
A hand-held vacuum for cigarette butts. “L.A.’s Totally Awesome,” the Dollar Store industrial cleaner they don’t bother diluting. Spray paint bought on clearance. Their real superpower is bargain hunting. 
    
When danger arises, they reach for the original crime fighting tools. Broken glass is no match for Kevlar-lined gloves! No clogged gutter can withstand a steel baton! 
   

Narrow scope, huge theme

How do you capture the impact of a major story (economy collapses) with one person's story? Like this, from Michael Kruse (ASNE award winner) at the St. Petersburg Times: http://www.tampabay.com/news/business/workinglife/hes-the-only-bag-boy-at-publix-with-an-mba/1066065

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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.

My 45-minute commute is totally worth it when ...

... I get to listen to 45 minutes of Gene Weingarten on The Bob Edwards Show on satellite radio.
 Weingarten has collected stories and columns in "The Fiddler in the Subway," and talks to Edwards about how his stories came about, about writing, about editing and all kinds of cool stuff. Anyone who's read Weingarten's pieces about violinist Joshua Bell playing for change in the subway, or people who've left their children locked in cars in hot weather, or 'The Great Zucchini,' will eat this up.

 Edwards asked him how the idea of finding the "armpit of America" came about. "The impetus for that one is that I'm kind of a jerk, a congenital smart-ass," Weingarten said. He had wondered about the many places people refer to as the armpit of America, and wanted to find the "real" one.

He also had a fascinating observation on writing, drawn in part from a long-ago story he did about a terribly inefficient sewage treatment plant in Detroit that basically wasn't treating sewage. His lead traced sewage from points around Detroit to the collecting point -- the plant. "And then it hits the fan," he wrote.

He used that example to say that the most important words aren't the ones you write, they're the ones that you don't write -- the ones you make pop up in a reader's head. By doing that, he said, you change the reader from a passive receiver of what you've written to an ally.

 You can download Bob Edwards shows here for $2.95. This one's worth it.

This is what happened

Go pick up "Zeitoun" by Dave Eggers and read it. I keep thinking about the argument du jour in journalism of whether you should (or can) be objective or, as some journalists believe, tell "the truth." I always think: Just tell the story. Journalists who talk about telling "the truth" are usually talking about their truth, how they think you should receive what they're reporting.

 But in this book, Eggars stays pretty clear of that, even though it's obvious he (or another author) could have laced it with politics. Instead, he trusts the story: He just tells you what this guy Zeitoun did after Hurricane Katrina, and what eventually happened to him.

He lets you figure out the rest. I love that.

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.

Bodani v. groundhog

Terrific, fun narrative. 'Nuff said.