A memory surfaces, humble threads and the power of finishing.
Humans will always have a need to explain themselves through story.
So let me begin with one.
I was working my first job at a daily newspaper in a small town outside New Haven, Connecticut. To say I was unskilled was an understatement. I had no experience, never went to journalism school. I’d never even written a newspaper story.
But a friend at a competing paper knew that I wanted to be a writer and gave me the recommendation that got me a tryout and then the job.
My first day in the newsroom, my new city editor handed me a journalism textbook. It was at least 20 years old.
I began my days at the police station, fetching stories about arrests and accidents. “A 19-year-old Milford youth was charged with burglary…” “A motorist was injured in a two-car collision…” many began. Standard, uninspired fare from a callow youth without a clue.
One weekend, I was dispatched to cover a drowning at a lake outside town. The park was jammed with families who had come to escape the summer heat and frolic in the cool water.
But there was no one swimming, only a fire department rowboat moving slowly across the smooth water. Beneath, divers searched for the body of a teenage boy who had disappeared.
On the banks, families talked in hushed tones, their games and Frisbee throwing ceased. Even the children played quietly in the dirt, as if they, too, were mindful of the tragedy unfolding before them.
The boy’s mother, a middle-aged woman, waited by a police car, slack-jawed, chain-smoking.
A diver surfaced. He signaled to the men in the boat. Suddenly, the boy’s head and shoulders broke through the water. I scribbled in my notebook.
The image of that dead boy is as clear as if I were still standing on the bank watching the rescuers carry his body onto the grassy shore.
He was naked except for long, sodden blue jeans. His chest was hairless, muscular and chalky white, like a sculptor’s marble. He looked asleep.
The mother leaned on the hood of the cruiser and stomped her feet in the dust.
I followed the rescue procession out of the park. Back in the newsroom, I struggled to write a story for the next day’s paper on the manual typewriters we used back then. My desk sat beside a black Associated Press teletype machine that spit out news almost as fast as it happened.
I was full of the experience, the images, the emotions I felt at the lake, but I sat at my typewriter unable to capture them.
I wrote lead after lead. I tried to describe the bitter staccato the boy’s mother beat in the ground. I ripped the abortive attempts out my typewriter. A pile of crumpled copy paper grew in the wastebasket at my feet.
Finally, I surrendered to the wire service standard that clattered incessantly over that machine next to me, the one my editor taught me. I don’t have the clip, but I’m sure it came out something like this: “A 17-year-old Milford youth drowned yesterday at Lake…”
As I worked this week, focusing on how reporters need to learn how to think effectively about their stories, this long-buried memory came back to me. I had written about it before, in slightly different form, nearly two decades ago, but I think it’s worth retelling.
I’ve never forgotten that experience because there was a story to tell that day, and I didn’t know how to tell it. I didn’t have the tools of narrative—scene-setting, the importance of a protagonist, the use of details to paint a picture. Today, editors who understand the value of storytelling and the skills needed to achieve it ingrain those strategies in reporters’ minds.
Most of all, I didn’t know how to think about a story. I didn’t know how to ask the question embedded in this week’s craft lesson: what is my story really about? It took many years later for another editor, Joel Rawson, at The Providence Journal, who understood storytelling and how to teach it, to drill that question in my head, a lesson that enabled me to tell stories, not just report the news.
Looking back, I think the story that day was not about death, but longing, a mother’s anguished desire that somehow her son would be rescued, pulled to the surface, resuscitated and brought back to her, the delicate thread connecting them unbroken. With that knowledge, I think I could have written a story about that woman waiting on the bank as the still crowd waited with her. I wish I had had the skills that I try to teach this week. Perhaps I could have done justice to that bereaved mother and her lost son.
CRAFT LESSON
“It’s one thing to be given a topic, but you have to find the idea or the concept within that topic. Once you find that idea or thread, all the other anecdotes, illustrations and quotes are pearls that you hang on this thread. The thread may seem very humble, the pearls may seem very flashy, but it’s still the thread that makes the necklace.”
The topic that day, many summers long past, was an accident, but, sitting at my Royal manual typewriter that day, I was unable to find the humble thread, or what literature professors call the theme.
That quote, from Washington Post sports writer Tom Boswell, speaks to the undeniable need for focus in effective writing. If I were the laminating sort, like my mentor, the late Don Murray, I would print it out, encase it in plastic and drop it from the skies, wherever writers congregate.
But that philosophy isn’t enough. That’s where the rest of “Finding any story’s heart with 5 questions and 70 seconds” comes into play. To recap, the first four questions, devised by David Von Drehle, are:
1. Why does it matter?
2. What’s the point?
3. Why is this story being told?
4. What does it say about life, about the world, about the times we live in?
Along with a fifth of my own making—What’s this story really about?—they enable a writer, no matter what genre, to find the central idea in any story. They can be answered at leisure, but for the writer on deadline the technique of freewriting can spit out a one-word theme in bursts that total 70 seconds. One minute, 10 seconds. Anyone can and should take that time to focus their story.
Without it, they’re like an explorer without a compass, a traveler without a map. Without it, they’re like a jeweler working without the humble threads of that craft.
With it, I might have told the story of the doomed boy and his mother the way it deserved. Aided with the theme “longing” in mind, I might have begun the story this way:
“The woman stood under the hot sun by the bank of the lake. All around her, people who had come for relief from the heat waited. No one spoke. Even the children played quietly in the dirt.
No one was swimming any more.
A fire department rowboat moved slowly across the lake. Beneath the surface, a diver searched for a boy whose mother waited on the bank, chain-smoking, hoping they would bring her son back to her. Alive.”
INTERVIEW
For months, I’ve been battling a short story about a man sitting by the bedside of his comatose sister.
And I’ve been losing the fight.
More than once, I've closed the file in frustration. I loved the opening and felt good about what followed, but I stalled on the ending. More than once, I told myself it was a mistake. The story was on life support. And I was ready to pull the plug.
And then I re-read my mini-interview with Robin Sloan, “The Power of Finishing and Fermenting: Three Questions.”
Sloan is the author of two novels, “Sourdough” and The New York Times bestseller "Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.” Before turning full-time to writing fiction, Sloan spent a decade working at the intersection of media and technology at The Poynter Institute, Current TV and Twitter, a fusion that helped create his brilliant, phantastical fictional landscape. I’m pretty sure he’s a genius; subscribe to his weekly newsletter, "Year of the Meteor," and you'll see why.
But for the longest time, his writing career was going nowhere. “For years,” he told me, “I thought of myself as someone who wanted to be a writer; for years, I maintained an archive of partial chapters belonging to novels I would one day write.”
Then something clicked: “The thing that unlocked writing for me—writing of all kinds, but fiction especially—was so simple it feels almost silly to type it out: finish things.”
Sloan talks about other things—the journalistic habit of saving string, and, befitting his second novel about a computer programmer that becomes a master bread maker, the power of fermentation, the process by which he throws together “ideas, sentences, experiences, feelings, all from my notebook, where I am always jotting.” He mixes them up and lets them sit, like sourdough starter.
When I read “finish things,” something clicked inside me. I opened my story file, but this time I was determined to finish, one way or another. I went online and found a State of Florida Do Not Resuscitate Order. In its terse, bloodless medical terminology, I found a way out. I worked the Order into the story and found my ending. I typed the last words, “I know we’ll keep talking,” and closed the file.
Perhaps because my goal was finishing the story rather than making it perfect, the critic inside me seemed to cut me some slack. Go ahead and finish, it said. You’ll still have time to make it better. You can share it with others, as Sloan advises, and get feedback. I’ve done that, sharing the draft with my wife and a friend, both of whose opinions I respect, however daunting their reactions may be. My story still needs revision, to be sure, but at last the draft is finished. I can move on. And so can you.
These mini-interviews with writers such as Sloan and Dan Barry reveal the impact of learning how writers behave and how they think. In their spare, but insightful, answers to just three questions, eloquence can be found, and a rare commodity: wisdom.
WRITERS SPEAK
Whether it’s a complete answer or a snippet of a writer’s words, I often find inspiration in collecting and sharing writing quotes.
- Michael Jordan isn’t a writer, but he does know something about failure. And failing is the only way, for the former pro basketball star and for writers, to attain success.
- For Stephen King, “writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub.” The only way to “outrun the self-doubt that’s always waiting to settle in” is to write fast, a theme explored in a previous craft lesson.
- Humorist nonpareil David Sedaris, facing the same journey, one littered with multiple drafts, relies on a counterintuitive solution: “...it helps to abandon hope…to put no pressure” on himself in the beginning. “If the eighth draft is torture, the first should be fun. At least if you’re writing humor.”
BOOKBAG
The electric typewriter that Robert A. Caro has used to write his magisterial multi-part biography of Lyndon B. Johnson is a testament to the value of analog in our digital age. “Today everybody believes fast is good,” the historian says in a Popular Mechanics interview. “Sometimes slow is good.”
I went back to school this week with “Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction,” drawn from the quarter century that editor and writing coach Jack Hart spent working side-by-side with storytellers at The Oregonian. Part textbook, part handbook, part anthology, it reflects Hart’s expert grasp of story theory as a university professor and the methods he used to midwife a remarkable string of narratives that won a slew of awards, including several Pulitzer Prizes. It strips away the confusion about what makes a good story interesting and exciting.
By offering accessible explanations, numerous examples and behind-the-story accounts, Hart gives you a blueprint to begin—or jumpstart—your career writing narrative nonfiction.I’ve had the intense experience of reading “The Beating Heart” to prepare for an interview with the writer, Gene Weingarten. Weingarten, a columnist for The Washington Post Magazine, is the only person to win the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing twice; once when he persuaded a world-class violinist to serenade rush-hour commuters on a D.C. subway platform, most of whom paid no attention, the other when he profiled parents whose children died when they left them unattended in their cars.
His gifts of narrative inventiveness and empathy are on full display in this riveting story about a heart transplant in 1986. It describes, in exceptional detail, the heartbreaking equation that links a murder-suicide to a young and poor single mother who became, improbably, perhaps the longest-living transplant patient on the planet. It’s excerpted from Weingarten’s new book, “One Day: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America,” written to explore, he writes, “whether, in the insistent gyre of human experience, there even is such a thing as ‘an ordinary day.’” Clearly, as this story shows in irresistible fashion, there is not.
CHIP IN YOUR EAR
“Ants Marching” by the Dave Matthews Band. Live version.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoezrZ-DCJw
“Can’t Run But” by Paul Simon. Features his experimentation with Latin rhythms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znfNpN6rfoM
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May the writing go well!
Credits:
Still water/Borna Bevanda on Unsplash
Heart symbol/Chang Duong on Unsplash
Microphones/Gritte on Unsplash
Quote marks/ PNG MART
Kids reading/Victoria Borodinova/Pexels
Feedback/Pexels
Dave Matthews Band/Wikimedia Commons
Paul Simon’s “Rhythm of the Saints” cover/Wikipedia