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.

What I learned: Bill Landauer on observation

Bill Landauer's story Doc rodeo won honorable mention for personality profile in the Keystone Press Awards. (Jason Plotkin's art was pretty dang good, too.) In another installment about what YDR staffers took from their honored work, here's Bill about what he learned while doing that story:

 The Doc Rodeo story reinforced why often as a reporter you need to just shut up and keep your eyes open. Most of that story came from watching, not from questioning. Doug Olle, the physical therapist, had access to the ring that Jason and I didn't have. We were allowed to hang with him on the sidelines, but we couldn't go into the ring. So we interviewed him first for a few minutes, then ran around trying to keep up with him, running in and out of exits and dodging bull calfs to watch him watching the riders. We could chat with him, but he was busy. Hours into the rodeo, he seemed to forget we were there, so after he sewed up a guy's mangled chin, we got to watch him talking shop and relating to the cowboys on a personal level, which was what we were hoping for.

 Observing and taking good notes, and then deciding to use just the best of those descriptive notes in your story, is a key to excellent work. (Plus, it can give you good material to use if your subject isn't talkative, or if you don't have a lot of time together). Anyone else have a good story to share about how observation played a role in a story?

'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.

A heady device

If done well, devices such as repeated (but varied) references to a particular thing in a story can make a piece of writing stronger.

I thought Bill Landauer did that in his story on people who were hoping to see Vice President Joe Biden in York. Bill kept referring to Biden's head/hair as, in a way, a symbol of what people were hoping to see. The reference starts in the the third graf -- "Now they all waited for the white haired dome in the black car to zip past ..." -- and reappeared a couple times:

Inside, behind tinted windows, white hair flashed.

and

The rear door opened and the coiffed white mop bobbed into daylight.

and

Then, to the back of Biden's head, "We voted for you!"

I thought by using one of Biden's most notable physical characteristics, Bill captured what it's like to try to catch a glimpse of someone famous in a crowd.

In OBX, Irene has left them waiting, waiting ...

Old friend Diane Tennant tells the story of people returning to Hatteras Island after Irene. It was the first day nonresidents could get back on the island.

Killer lines (W.C. Heinz)

"We walked back down the driveway and I noticed then for the first time that the seed pods of the swamp maples had put out their dark red dollhouse chandeliers and that the forsythia along the driveway was chartreuse, ready to break out into yellow. Beyond and above the roofline of the hotel the long, thin, crowded branches of the top of the big willow by the lake hung in yellow fronds so that the whole, moving in the breeze and the bright sun, seemed a golden fountain."
 --W.C. Heinz, "The Professional"

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.' "

What does your writing room look like?

Stephen King's writing space

Gotta have some fun with this:

Sue found a Dave Eggers column in The Washington Post in which he discusses 'the writing life.' He says he writes "in a shed in my backyard. I have a sheet draped over the shed's window because without it the morning sun would blast through and blind me. So I'm looking at a gray sheet, which is nailed to the wall in two places and sags in the middle like a big, gray smile. And the sheet is filthy. And the shed is filthy. If I left this place unoccupied for a week, it would become home to woodland animals. They probably would clean it up first."

Mark Twain's study

 His point is that sometimes the shed drives him nuts and he just has to get out. But his description got Sue and I thinking about what the writing rooms -- real ones, and/or an imagined ideal -- of people we know would look like, and what that would say about them.

 For example, we know that Buffy writes in a room decorated with frilly, fluffy pink things and a pink-rhinestone encrusted laptop.

 So what does your writing room -- the real one, and the one you'd create for yourself if you could -- look like? Leave your answers in the comments.

Capturing history ... all of it

You could make an argument that as historical as the health-care bill itself is, the debate, both in and out of Congress, was just as historical. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank does a great job in this story weaving both scenes together during the final hours before the vote.

Do you see what you're writing about?

At first glance this site might seem photography-hostile -- after all, it's called Unphotographable. And each entry begins, "This is a picture I did not take of ..."

But it's produced by a guy who describes himself as a photographer and writer. What he's doing, he says, is recording what he sees when he doesn't have his camera, wishes he'd taken a shot, or "had been brave enough to click the shutter."

And what he comes up with is an exercise in attention to detail and descriptive writing -- something well worth focusing on as you're out in the field. His entries are short, vivid passages on what he's looking at. Like a picture in words. It's pretty cool.

Nice turns of phrase

This from David von Drehle's profile of Glenn Beck in Time magazine. I like both the food metaphor in the line about bipartisanship, and the financial one about trust & good faith.

Does anyone think it detracts from the picture he's trying to paint by using two metaphors back-to-back that are so different? Just a thought. They still work for me.

Glenn Beck: the pudgy, buzz-cut, weeping phenomenon of radio, TV and books. Our hot summer of political combat is turning toward an autumn of showdowns over some of the biggest public-policy initiatives in decades. The creamy notions of postpartisan cooperation — poured abundantly over Obama's presidential campaign a year ago — have curdled into suspicion and feelings of helplessness. Trust is a toxic asset, sitting valueless on the national books. Good faith is trading at pennies on the dollar. The old American mind-set that Richard Hofstadter famously called "the paranoid style" — the sense that Masons or the railroads or the Pope or the guys in black helicopters are in league to destroy the country — is aflame again, fanned from both right and left. Between the liberal fantasies about Brownshirts at town halls and the conservative concoctions of brainwashed children goose-stepping to school, you'd think the Palm in Washington had been replaced with a Munich beer hall.

Using your senses

We've talked a lot about sensory writing giving life and detail to your stories. I came across this song, by Jesse Winchester, that I thought was cool because it's written to be nothing but a sensory story about what you'd experience walking down a road or across a field in rural Mississippi. Just shows how evocative this kind of writing can be. Check it out:

Mississippi you're on my mind

I think I see a wagon rutted road
With the weeds growing tall between the tracks,
And along one side runs a rusty barbed wire fence
And beyond that sits an old tar paper shack.

Chorus

Mississippi, you're on my mind,
Mississippi, you're on my mind,
Oh, oh, Mississippi you're on my mind.

I think I hear a noisy old John Deere
In a field specked with dirty cotton lint
And below the field runs a little shady creek,
and there you'll find the cool green leaves of mint.

Chorus

I think I smell the honeysuckle vine,
The heavy sweetness like to make me sick.
And the dogs, my God, they're hungry all the time
And the snakes are sleeping where the weeds are thick.

Chorus

I think I feel an angry oven heat,
The southern sun just blazes in the sky.
And in the dusty weeds, an old fat grasshopper jumps.
I wanna make it to that creek before I fry.