Wise (and brief) words on narrative writing, editing

Sharing this after discovering it via Gangrey.com:

Quick takes from PNA storytelling seminar

I'll post more from this seminar later, but for now, some things to get you thinking:


Marion Winik, author and NPR commentator: "The things you think you shouldn't do and can't do are the things you should do and can do."
 And,
 "Writer's block is simply a lack of typing. Sit down and type and then your writer's block is over."

John Luciew, Patriot-News enterprise writer, talked about his long investigative narrative "In the path of a serial killer," the story of how police first suspected the husband of a woman murdered by a serial killer: "I wanted all the key people in the story to be characters, not talking heads." So he did the reporting/writing that enabled him to make them characters in his story.

 Chris McDougall, author/freelance writer, who wrote "Born to Run," about a hidden tribe of people who are fantastic distance runners: "Human life is about movement." Same is true of stories, he said; something evolves, something changes. "What's the journey? What's the progression?"

Am I 'in'?

Granted, it's not often we get the time to work on a story where these questions would come into play, but I thought this was great stuff from The Washington Post's Hank Steuver. He shared questions he asks himself to figure out whether he's spent enough time with his source.

Stuff like: Have I seen them with wet hair? Have I seen them shop? Have I seen the inside of their fridge?

Keep the list around (or the link to it). Might come in handy sooner than you think.

This never gets old

"This American Life" is so popular now that it's easy to come across stories or videos featuring Ira Glass talking about what makes a great TAL story. Nevertheless, I'll read or listen to them every time, hoping to internalize what he's talking about.

 Here's such a piece in The Seattle Times. In it, Glass talks about the need for surprise in a story, something that's unexpected buy key to what happened. I was drawn to this quote: "Even stories of life-changing, traumatic events can lack surprise," Glass said.

How many times are we attracted to stories of people who have overcome an illness, or experienced a traumatic event, or something like that, and we think that's enough? It's not that those can't be good stories. But the best stories, as Glass knows, are ones that are at least a little bit unpredictable. Find those stories, and tell them.

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.

Overcoming obstacles in video storytelling

As part of Living's 'Senses' project, Kate Penn produced a video about a deaf couple raising a hearing child. Brad passed along this note, which talks about challenges Kate faced and how she dealt with them:

"The video that goes with this week's Sense/Ability story had some cool challenges involved.

The Drawbaughs answered Kate's questions with sign language, and Kate had to match up their responses with the interpretor's translations. (The interpretor doesn't speak as they are signing, she gathers their statement and then repeats it afterward.) So once Kate assembled the video, she reconnected with the interpretor, who came here and helped her place the responses at the right moments during editing. 

Another challenge was showing "B roll" while still keeping the Drawbaughs on screen so their signing could be seen.

Some interesting obstacles, but she put it all together well."

'Think about narrative in the broadest sense'

I just came across this piece from Michael Pollan on Nieman Narrative Digest, and it's the freshest take on narrative I've read in a while. (Even though it was published a few years ago).

I haven't read anything by Pollan, though he's going on my list now that I've read this. He talks about expanding your view of narrative to go beyond "people doing things." This essay is about nature writing, and he has great ideas of how to think about narrative in non-human things -- a system (like how water gets from one place to another), or a process, or an animal, or a life-cycle, for example.

He talks about ecology as a way of thinking, and something that "provides you with all your transitions" because something is always happening down the line. He talks about how Rachel Carson, in "Silent Spring," wrote deeply about neurotoxins and what they actually do: "Following a thing through a system is a powerful tool. It accomplishes something your editors are always driving you crazy about: Why should readers care?"

He talks about when/how to use first person; about how you can make learning into a useful narrative tool; and about building suspense.

On profiles

Notes from yesterday's video session with Jacqui on profiles:

• They bring personality into the newspaper; most readers learn about a subject better if it's attached to a person.
• Profiles demand great interviewing; require journalists to observe (describe people and place, set characters in a place)
• You have to report well around the person so when you characterize or explain motivation, you have it nailed down
• Doing profiles teaches responsibility; you have to have it right

Key types of profiles

• Nano-profiles -- a way to build character into a story even if the story is not all about the person. You bring someone to life in a paragraph or two; tell us about someone's character or values in the moment.
• Cradle-current profiles -- seldom as necessary as we think they are. negatives are that they take too long to do, take up a lot of space and often read like resumes. Strive to do profiles as internal resumes rather than external ones.
  
• Niche profile -- develop who a person is at a key point in time. Pick the defining moments in their life (not their whole life); your profile then gets much more narrow. Many profiles spend too much time on back story; condense the resume stuff to a couple grafs in a story or into a box. Get dialogue, not quotes, to reveal someone's essence.
  

Tips for interviewing for profiles

• Props are helpful. Get people to tell you the stories behind things in their office or their home. Look for things they can tell you about, instead of getting them to answer direct questions.
• Use storyteller questions to put people into the timeline of their own life. Where were you when this huge event happened? Tell me about the day. When did you get up? What did you wear that day? What did you eat for breakfast? And so on. You want to build scenes.
• When you ask those questions -- say, what did you eat for breakfast -- ask more to get greater detail (what kind of cereal? in what kind of bowl? did you drink the milk out of the bowl after you were done? and so on.)
  

Timeline reporting technique

• Build two, maybe three timelines: One, the classic resume of the person; two, the defining moments in that person's life; three, what's going on in culture or society that provides the backdrop to the person you're profiling. Use those to build your story.

A little more later.

39 steps, 10,000 words

Some pretty cool thoughts on what you can learn about storytelling -- mainly visual, but print too -- from Alfred Hitchcock films, courtesy of a blog called 10,000 Words. It touches on everything from dialogue to foreshadowing to streamlining your storytelling.

And there are video clips, too.

Here's another writer's take on Hitchcock and storytelling.

The game story, as an art form

I grew up reading Dave Kindred, along with others in The Washington Post -- Ken Denlinger, Thomas Boswell, Bill Gildea, Shirley Povich -- who were sportswriting legends to me, way, way before Kornheiser and Wilbon showed up, good as they may be.

I just came across this piece by Kindred about why sports game stories are important -- when they're well done -- even though for a long time, newspapers have operated on the philosophy that game stories might be expendable or not worth much space because everyone already knows the final score.

Kindred points out what he thinks makes a game story good, and it goes way beyond the final score. He includes some tips that I think are great.

I think you can find examples of well-done game stories in our paper. Read Frank Bodani's Penn State game story from last Sunday, particularly the first several grafs. PSU's loss is immediately given a physical texture and put in the context not only of a season but several seasons.

And Frank does one thing I love -- and tried to do when I was covering Virginia Tech -- and that is, he thinks about how the fans are thinking about the game, and incorporates that into his story. It's not that he is a fan; it's that he can think from that perspective. So you get lines like: "The sold-out, whiteout crowd stood and watched, mostly muttering to themselves, trying against odds to urge their heroes on, barely believing what they were seeing." Great stuff.

Any writer on any beat should read some game stories to see the differences in why some are good and some aren't. After all, as Kindred points out, a game story should be a story, not just a recap of play-by-play. And the game is always part of something bigger than just what happens that day.

That kind of approach to any story is going to make you a better reporter and lift up your writing.

A storytelling guidebook

This is an older column by Roy Peter Clark, and I'm not sure exactly why it showed up on the Nieman Narrative Digest's Web site just now. I think he wrote it during when the journalism world was abuzz with scandals like Jayson Blair and memoir writers who were admitting they made up stuff about their lives and thought it was OK.

Anyway, since we talk a lot in here about using fiction-writing techniques while dealing with facts only and telling true stories, this is an excellent read and very important to our storytelling work.

Lane DeGregory interview

Nieman Narrative Digest folks quiz Lane DeGregory, who just won a Pulitzer for feature writing (for the feral child story), on her story about a guy who was on the plane that went into the Hudson and how he got back on a plane.

It's a quick read and worth it.

Narrative Digest : Interview

The Making of a Rescue: 17 Minutes of Terror

Nieman Narrative Digest posted this (link below) with a note that it was the type of story that would normally have begun, "A four-year-old boy was rescued yesterday after the car he was riding in ..." etc.

True enough, though to be fair, this is not a next-day news story, as is made clear at the end. But I think the point to take from this is: Any time we run on a breaking news story that involves drama like this, and we cover it as a straight news story, we can go back to that story days later and re-tell it as a narrative if we can get the right sourcing and if the story's worth re-telling. And those types of stories are great reads.

The Nieman folks point out that it's really well organized, going from character-to-character and development-to-development, and that does seem like the strength of this piece.

For my taste, the first 3 grafs of the 2nd section make a good point but might be a bit overdone. I'm curious to hear what others think.

Narrative Digest : Notable Narrative : The Making of a Rescue: 17 Minutes of Terror

Golden sources in narrative

Pat Abdalla flagged this story from espn.com that recounts the events leading up to the car accident that killed a young California Angels (sorry, I'm not calling them by their legal name) pitcher named Nick Adenhart.

Pat noticed with interest that the reporter used text-messages and Facebook updates as sources.

The story starts with a scene at the hospital after Adenhart has been pronounced dead; then goes back to 12 hours before the crash, and works its way forward as a narrative. The Facebook and text updates quoted certainly help drive the narrative and give the story specifics it might not otherwise have.

We've talked at different times about those "golden sources" for true narratives -- somebody's journal, an official entry log of events, a videotape of an event from which action can be described -- and you can certainly add Facebook updates, Twitter, text-messaging, all that stuff. The key is to verify that the posts actually were made by the person you're writing about. Once you have that confirmation, you have a valuable source for your story.

Dialogue that does a lot of work

Here's a quick heads-up on effective use of dialogue. Check out this passage from Jeff's story on the couple who wants to live a self-sustaining life:

---------

They passed a farmhouse on the left, with a few acres of visible land. Fred imagines that one day, he’ll build a hobby farm on land like that.

"I really want to get a goat," Fred said. "Eggs from the chicks and milk from the goat. That would be awesome."

"Babe," Towanda said, "you don't even drink milk."

"I'd drink it if it came from a goat," Fred said.

Then it was past an Amish house, with clothes stretched out on a line between the house and a side building. They just paid to have a dryer fixed.

"Look at those clothes out on the line," Fred said. "I could have gotten a clothesline or drying rack and it would have been free."

"Babe," Towanda said, "we're not hanging up our clothes outside."

"I didn't even think of that," Fred replied. "It could have been free --"

"Babe."

"Basically free."

As Fred laughed, Towanda's eyes made the trip around the car again.

-------

The dialogue does several things: It reveals some things about Fred and Towanda's relationship, which is important to the story; it gives you information about their goals that is essential to the story; and it's funny, which should make most readers like Fred and Towanda, at least on some level ... and that's important to a story, too.

That passage, written another way, could have been a series of paragraphs describing things: Fred said he wanted this and that; Towanda reminded him that he didn't drink milk; Fred said he wants clotheslines but Towanda said no; and maybe there would have one line between quote marks.

When you deconstruct it like that, it's easy to see how much more engaging that dialogue is.

A hard and beautiful read

This story is so good on so many levels ... and it may be the most difficult thing you will have read in quite some time.

But do read it.

It's Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post writing about what happens after a parent forgets a child in the back seat of a car, and the child dies. This story will hit you hard. Many times.

From a writing/editing standpoint, when you start to break down some of the parts of the story that make it as effective as it is, there are a few things (at least) that I'm paying attention to. First and foremost, the breadth and depth of the reporting; he couldn't have written this story without a towering reporting job. Beyond that:

• Start with the 'readout.' I don't know if this was Weingarten's focusing statement, or if a copy editor wrote it after reading the story, but it captures precisely what the piece is about: Forgetting a child in the back seat of a hot, parked car is a horrifying, inexcusable mistake. But is it a crime?
• Weingarten parcels out some of the horrific details throughout the piece. For one, no reader could take that kind of stuff graf after graf. But by using details when they matter, he never lets you forget how horrible it is when this happens. And you have to carry that with you to truly understand the story.
• Little things. Example: At the top of page 2 (of the online version) he explains what happens when a parent forgets a child in the car. And how often it happens, and roughly during what time of year. And then: "The season is almost upon us." Wow. Subtle and full of power at the same time.
• Big (almost invisible) things. Watch how he characterizes Lyn Balfour (she comes in late in the story ... and actually, also pay attention to how he gets to her in the story). He shows you her character by description, but he also tells you something important about her. And then, as he continues to tell her story, he describes her in ways that may make you think differently about her, about the person he first described. In a chat about the story, he said he was trying to do that. It worked for me.

These are just a few things. Let me know if you see more about this story that you like, or can learn from, or whatever.

Learning from an attempted narrative

I don't mean to criticize this piece that appeared in the Lancaster New Era, because I don't know the circumstances/deadlines under which it was written and edited.

But it's a good one to look at to see what amounts to a partially formed narrative about a compelling event -- two divers who drifted away from their boat off the Australian coast and waited hours to be rescued.

Basically, the writer got a long interview and connected long quotes with some transitions and some paragraphs that give information you need to know. You can see some of the key parts of narrative here: Beginning with action; an early line announcing the conflict ("And what he saw alarmed him"); the nut grafs that tell you this is going to be a "how this happened" narrative as opposed to a "what happened" narrative.

But there are missed opportunities in the reporting and the writing. The diver is the only source in story. She is not fleshed out as someone we should care about beyond the fact that she was a human being stranded in the ocean; we can't really connect with her. In the writing, there is very little pacing to build up to the resolution, so the resolution, when the helicopter finds them, passes by almost unremarkably (it should be the high point of the story). The writing steps on itself during one of the key tension points -- when they are in the water and see airplanes -- by using the word 'saw' three times in six paragraphs.

So again ... it remains an interesting interview and story the way it's written. I think it helps, though, to think about how much more it could have been, and what it would have taken to really tell this story.

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.

I'd make this the next book you read

I just finished Jack Hart's book (links here and here). Here is my review on Goodreads. I'm blogging it because I think this is a book every newsroom staffer -- no matter what your job -- should read:

I would like to have this book loaded on a computer chip and implanted in my brain. Then I could draw on it at will. And as a writer and editor, I would scale mountains and slay dragons and always return home a hero.
But such automatic success would eliminate the trying, failing, trying again and succeeding that is so rewarding if you are a writer or editor. You know you'll never know it all, but you keep learning to get as close as you can.
So what I'll do is just keep this book nearby. I'll dip back into it now and again for its hundreds of dead-on, plain-English writing and editing tips. Beyond that, I'll remember its message: You can be a better writer and editor not by waiting for a thunderbolt to form you, or by finding the key to the secret room where the elements of great writing reveal themselves, but by consciously working at the precision elements of the craft, for a lifetime.

A moment with Jack Hart: Meaningful detail

Anyone who has been to a writing seminar of any kind has probably heard someone advise writers to avoid the two sins of details -- using them for their own sake, just because they're in your notebook; or not using them at all.

I just read a passage in Jack Hart's book about that second sin that hit me right between the eyes. A lot of writers keep their distance from telling details -- to the detriment of their stories -- and it might not be your fault. And if you can unlearn something all of us have been taught, you can improve your writing.

Here is the bolt from Hart's book: "Our impulse is to observe specifics, reach conclusions, and report the conclusions. ... You're doing exactly what you've been trained to do. Modern education is all about inductive reasoning -- learning how to generalize from specifics."

Nothing's wrong with that, Hart says. But that's not what you should be doing if you want to tell someone a story.

Here's what I think: We're trained as journalists to dig out information and report it. We're almost hard-wired to conduct interviews, ask questions, and report -- in graf-direct quote-graf-direct quote format -- what we found out. So in many cases, when we see behavior or hear dialogue or watch a scene unfold, we are working so hard to figure out how to connect it to a larger meaning that we miss the fact that what we're watching or seeing or hearing is itself what we need to report.

That goes for a hard-news story just as much as for a true narrative. Our training, embedded somewhere deep in our heads, tells us to write, "'I will not vote for that,' the councilman said angrily," when we should write, "The councilman slammed his fist on the table and knocked his pen to the floor. 'I will note vote for that!' he shouted."

Our skill at including context, and at connecting that behavior or dialogue to the larger meaning of the the story, is crucial. But don't deaden your writing by figuring out what the scene or the behavior means, and then blowing off the crucial details to report only that the team celebrated joyously at midfield. Tell me that the offensive tackle was crying as he and the coach hugged for what seemed like a minute as the other players shouted and held their helmets aloft.

Again: You have to unlearn some of what you've learned, or at least teach yourself to think differently, to write like this effectively. You have to believe in the power of the right detail. You have to resist the urge to dilute telling details by assigning them broader descriptions -- and leaving the detail itself out. You also have to resist the compulsion of journalists to label everything with a descriptive tag.

A correspondent recently covered the Christmas tree giveaway at Helping Hands. He called me and said he was frustrated with his piece. For one thing, he said, he couldn't figure out how to describe the people who showed up to get trees without, he felt, being condescending toward them by calling them "needy" or some similar catch-all phrase.

I told him to forget trying to wrap them all up with a word. You don't need to do it; it doesn't add anything to the story. He read me a line in the story that said something like, "Some were out of a job, some were working but struggling to get by, some were homeless." That's all you need, I said. You've just used specifics of what you found out instead of a one-size-fits-all descriptor.

Although that's not the most stirring detail in the world, it shows that as a writer, you have to be conscious of what your choices are, and savvy enough to make the right ones.

From Hart: Before a reader can get to the same place you are, "they need to see what you saw, hear what you heard, and smell what you smelled. You must share your experience, not the conclusion you drew from it."

He quotes Hemingway: "Find what gave you the emotion. Then write it down, making it clear so the reader will see it, too, and have the same feeling that you had."