Chip's Writing Lessons #32
Writers Speak: Scott Spencer on Dreaming Out Loud
Interview: Insecurity Travels with Every Keystroke: Four Questions with Jacqui Banaszynski
Writing to Savor: “Death and Valor on an American Warship,” by T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, Robert Faturechi, ProPublica
Tip of the Week: Full Stop
WRITERS SPEAK
“Writing is a way of dreaming out loud, and in public; even the most noble tales, if truly told, contain within them nuggets of evidence about the teller: soft spots, blind spots, weird obsessions. Wariness about these potentially embarrassing aspects and a willingness to weed them out is a deadly practice for a writer.”
INTERVIEW: Insecurity Travels with Every Keystroke: Four Questions with Jacqui Banaszynski
Jacqui Banaszynski
After more than three decades in newspapers, Jacqui Banaszynski is now editor of Nieman Storyboard, which celebrates and examines the art and craft of narrative journalism. She is a professor emerita at the Missouri School of Journalism and faculty fellow at The Poynter Institute. Her reporting career took her to all seven continents, including three trips to Antarctica. She has written about corruption and crime, beauty pageants and popes, AIDS and the Olympics, dogsled expeditions and refugee camps, labor strikes and political strife, traffic fatalities and family tragedies. While at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, her series “AIDS in the Heartland” won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. She was a finalist for the 1986 Pulitzer in international reporting for coverage of the Ethiopian famine and won the nation’s top deadline sports reporting award for coverage of the 1988 Olympics. Banaszynski has edited numerous award-winning projects, including ones that won the American Society of News Editors’ Best Writing award, Ernie Pyle Award for human-interest writing, and national business and investigative prizes. In 2008, she was named to the Association of Sunday and Features Editors’ Features Hall of Fame.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned?
There are no small stories. Every story is important to the people it’s about, and every story should respect the people it’s for.
An extension of that: Don’t confuse the size of the masthead, the circulation or the assignment with the value or quality of the work. People in a small community deserve the same level of journalistic care as those in the big-dog markets — and they probably need it more. And the only real limit to your aspirations is you.
What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing (or editing/teaching) life?
As a writer: Good writing comes from good reporting. Great writing comes from great reporting. This came as a happy surprise that revealed itself over years of struggle (late-night tears and insecurity that would have been debilitating if not for my belief in answers to No. 1 above and wiring for No. 3 below.) I have never been, and am still not, an easy or eager writer. Insecurity travels with every keystroke. But I’ve learned to let that be, and trust that if I have the right goods in my notebook, and am determined to communicate clearly and effectively with readers, I can find my way through the writing.
As an editor: No one wants me to be the editor I had always wanted or needed; they want me to be the editor they want or need — even if it’s not me. And nothing much good comes of pulling punches. (See reference to “brickbat” in No. 3 below.)
As a teacher: I can’t teach anyone anything. All I can do is put knowledge in their path, try to light the way and clear the rocks a bit, but then accept that they will — or won’t — pick up that knowledge when they need it to go forward.
If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer (or editor), what would it be?
I don’t trust that how I see myself is how others see or experience me. Isn’t that why we resist the one-interview profile? So I crowd-sourced this one. (It was a small crowd.) Responses ranged from Fairy Godmother to Story Whisperer to Story Doctor to Xena Story Warrior to Brickbat. For now, I’ll go with one that I hope is true:
ER doc. Which means (I hope) I am calm, focused and effective under pressure. I care about the patient — or why would I do this work? — but don’t fold in the face of blood or chaos, and don’t indulge in my emotions to the extent it gets in the way of the work that needs to be done — which is never about me. (The same person, who knows me well, says I could probably land a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier in rough seas. I think he said this knowing we would never have to test that theory. He also knows I love to fly, and have always wanted to be in the cockpit. Alas, both metaphors are challenged by the reality that while I’m OK with blood, I puke at the smell of puke. And I get seasick.)
A funny variation on the above: An editor-boss once told me that one of the reasons he valued me was because “You’ll do dishes.” The feminist in me bristled — but I knew him well enough to know it was meant as a compliment: He could count on me to do what needed to be done and not feel I was above the mundane work. That allowed me to push back a bit for a discussion on what higher-level work I could/should be doing, and how he could support it.
What’s the best piece of writing/editing advice anyone ever gave you?
Two things:
Every story prepares you for the next story. So quit obsessing over the story someone else is doing, and give your best to the story in front of you. (Longer backstory here, but that’s a large part of how I did “AIDS in the Heartland,” the project that won a Pulitzer. I couldn’t have done that series 10, or even two, years before I did.
Hit the send button. This wisdom came to me back in the early ’80s, when I was busting deadline as I obsessed over some basic civic story, probably from a planning commission meeting. So many planning commission meetings! The AME (Thank you, Steve Ronald.) stopped by and told me to put a period at the end of my next sentence, peel out the process BS, and hit SEND. The story was going inside the B section no matter how it was written. And it needed efficiency and clarity — not gothic prose.
The second answer above may seem to contradict the first. But it doesn’t. What I learned from this is to pay attention to the purpose of a story, and let that purpose guide the prose. An informational story needs to be just that: direct and utilitarian. It can open the door to follow-up enterprise pieces, but it shouldn’t ask the reader to wade through my writerly ego. And it shouldn’t ask the copy desk to wait through my angst.
This taught me not to fall in love with “creative” structures when the best thing for the reader is a quick list or Q&A or, yes, inverted pyramid. It also helped me get more efficient, and save time and creative juice for the stories that called for them.
That lesson has informed all my writing, editing and teaching — and reminded me of one of my mother’s many no-nonsense wisdoms: Don’t dress up a pig. Bacon is fine on its own. (If she were alive today, she would scoff at the trend of bacon bits in muffins and ice cream. She wouldn’t be wrong.)
BOOKBAG
The best fictional crime writers know how to lure readers with indelible characters and keep them enthralled, book after book. In this bite-sized piece, The Guardian asked some of the greats behind Jack Reacher, V.I. Warshawski, Harry Hole and others “how they came up with their most famous creations, what it’s like to live with them over decades and if they’ll last the distance.”
WRITING TO SAVOR
“Death and Valor on an American Warship,” by T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, Robert Faturechi, ProPublica
A little after 1:30 a.m. on June 17, 2017, Alexander Vaughan tumbled from his bunk onto the floor of his sleeping quarters on board the Navy destroyer USS Fitzgerald. The shock of cold, salty water snapped him awake. He struggled to his feet and felt a torrent rushing past his thighs.
Around him, sailors were screaming. “Water on deck. Water on deck!” Vaughan fumbled for his black plastic glasses and strained to see through the darkness of the windowless compartment.
Underneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, 12 miles off the coast of Japan, the tidy world of Berthing 2 had come undone. Cramped bunk beds that sailors called coffin racks tilted at crazy angles. Beige metal footlockers bobbed through the water. Shoes, clothes, mattresses, even an exercise bicycle careered in the murk, blocking the narrow passageways of the sleeping compartment.
In the dim light of emergency lanterns, Vaughan glimpsed men leaping from their beds. Others fought through the flotsam to reach the exit ladder next to Vaughan’s bunk on the port side of the ship. Tens of thousands of gallons of seawater were flooding into the compartment from a gash that had ripped through the Fitzgerald’s steel hull like it was wrapping paper.
As a petty officer first class, these were his sailors, and in those first foggy seconds Vaughan realized they were in danger of drowning.
At 6 feet, 1 inch and 230 pounds, Vaughan grabbed a nearby sailor by the T-shirt and hurled him toward the ladder that led to the deck above. He yanked another, then another.
Vaughan’s leg had been fractured in three places. He did not even feel it.
“Get out, get out,” he shouted as men surged toward him through the rising water.
Berthing 2, just below the waterline and barely bigger than a 1,200-square-foot apartment, was home to 35 sailors. They were enlisted men, most in their 20s and 30s, many new to the Navy. They came from small towns like Palmyra, Virginia, and big cities like Houston. They were white, black, Latino, Asian. On the Fitzgerald, they worked as gunners’ mates, sonar experts, cafeteria workers and administrative assistants.
Seaman Dakota Rigsby, 19, was newly engaged. Sonar Technician Rod Felderman, 28, was expecting the birth of his first child. Gary Rehm Jr., 37, a petty officer first class, was the oldest sailor in the compartment, a mentor to younger crew members.
As the water rose past their ankles, their waists, their chests, the men fought their way to the port side ladder and waited, shivering in the swirling debris, for their chance to escape.
Shouting over a crescendo of seawater, Vaughan and his bunkmate, Joshua Tapia, a weapons specialist, worked side by side. They stationed themselves at the bottom of the ladder, grabbing the sailors and pushing them, one by one, up the steps. At the top, the men shot out the small opening, as the rising water forced the remaining air from the compartment.
Suddenly, the ship lurched to the right, knocking sailors from their feet. Some slipped beneath the surface. Others disappeared into the darkness of a common bathroom, carried by the force of water rushing to fill every available space.
Vaughan and Tapia waited until they were alone at the bottom of the ladder. When the water reached their necks, they, too, climbed out the 29-inch-wide escape hatch. Safe, they peered back down the hole. In the 90 seconds since the crash, the water had almost reached the top of Berthing 2.
Now they faced a choice. Naval training demanded that they seal the escape hatch to prevent water from flooding the rest of the ship. But they knew that bolting it down would consign any sailors still alive to death.
Vaughan and Tapia hesitated. They agreed to wait a few seconds more for survivors. Tapia leaned down into the vanishing inches of air left in Berthing 2.
“Come to the sound of my voice,” he shouted."
This finely etched, dramatic scene is just the opening of a remarkable series that won ProPublica the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting by documenting a collision between an American destroyer and a tanker in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan. It is the opening salvo of a damning indictment of the failures of the U.S. Navy to address defects in training and staffing its most powerful ships, revealing “neglect by Navy leadership, serious mistakes by officers — and extraordinary acts of valor and endurance by the crew.” The accident left 10 sailors dead by drowning and scores physically and psychologically wounded. The passage draws its immense power from details, precise physical description, vivid details and dialogue. The writers also rely on similes and analogies that make it possible to grasp the unfamiliar. It shows the power of mining interviews as well as documents to render a chaotic scene with unerring power. It’s not only worth studying, but copying out to fully appreciate its craftsmanship.
Notice the verbs that propel the action and create the vivid scenes: “tumbled,” “snapped,” “bobbed,” “fought,” and “stationed.”
Study the details: “barely bigger than a 1,200-square-foot apartment, was home to 35 sailors;” “At 6 feet, 1 inch and 230 pounds: the hometowns of the young sailors and their various jobs.”
Observe how the writers and their editors aren’t afraid of a lengthy lead (it’s even longer than what appears here). To recreate the horrific events of that night, they need the space and justify it by recreating in fulsome detail what happened. It’s a magazine-style approach that is a master class in creative nonfiction to study and savor.
TIP OF THE WEEK
The single best way to improve a first draft is to use more periods.
– h/t Deborah Gump
First drafts are explorations of our minds. As we process what we think, know and believe, our sentences usually meander as we strive for expression. The period provides impact and pacing. Don’t be afraid to replace the brief pause of a comma when revising with a full stop. It will heighten the power of your stories by giving the reader the breathing space to fully grasp what you are trying to convey. Try it. Next time. Every time.
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Nulla dies sine linea / Never a day without a line
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