Chip's Writing Lessons #69













IN THIS ISSUE

• Writers Speak | David Sedaris on the importance of reading

• Interview | 4 Questions with Steve Padilla

• Craft Lessons | Unforced errors

• Writing to Savor | “In one small prairie town, two warring visions of America,” by Tim Sullivan, Associated Press

• Tip of the Week | Finish the story, even if you hate it

WRITERS SPEAK

“Write every day and read everything you can get your hands on. People who write have to read other people’s writing...You need to know what else is out there." - David Sedaris

INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH STEVE PADILLA

Steve Padilla

Steve Padilla is editor of Column One, the showcase for storytelling at the Los Angeles Times. Padilla joined the Times in 1987 as a night-shift police reporter but soon moved on to editing. He has edited a wide variety of subjects—including politics, international news and religion—and helped guide the Times’ Pulitzer-winning coverage of a botched bank robbery in North Hollywood in 1997. He serves as writing coach and devotes his Twitter feed (@StevePadilla2) to writing technique. Before the Times, he was a reporter for the San Diego Union and editor of Hispanic Link Weekly Report, a national newsletter on Latino affairs. He earned his B.A. in print journalism and history from the University of Southern California.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as an editor?

The biggest lesson came early in my editing career—while serving as editor of the Daily Trojan at the University of Southern California. That’s when I discovered what I call the megaphone effect. When you’re the boss, your words are amplified, both good and bad, especially the bad.

I was chatting with another editor about a story padded with a bunch of unnecessary material and said something like “it was filled with all sorts of extra crap.” The editor looked horrified and earnestly told me I shouldn’t say a fellow student’s story was crap. I tried to tell her that’s not what I meant at all—that I didn’t mean the story was crap. I was just using that word for “stuff.” Too late. The damage was done. As I look back now, I’m grateful that lesson came so early in my editing career because it saved me from unfortunate experiences in professional settings. This doesn’t mean withholding criticism or sugar-coating everything, but ever since that day in the Daily Trojan newsroom, I’ve remembered how words matter, especially if you’re the boss.

What has been the biggest surprise of your editing life?

There have been plenty of unpleasant surprises in my editing career, but I want to share a good one: that the writers who supposedly resist editing actually will embrace it. But this attitude shift comes with an “if.” If the editing is specific, useful and backed by solid reasoning, even the grumpiest of writers will embrace it. (Well, many of them.) Part of the issue is presentation. For example, if I find the perfect opening for a story tucked away in the 25th paragraph, I never say, “You buried the lead.” I’ll say, “This is so good we have to move it up.” I’ve never had anyone complain about that.

If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as an editor, what would it be?

May I share two metaphors—one that fits my day-to-day duties and one that expresses my ideal? The first is coach, and not a writing coach. Like a football or basketball coach, I’m standing on the sidelines, guiding, training, cheering, encouraging, sometimes disapproving. The other image is orchestra conductor. That’s my favorite relationship with a writer. I just stand in front of the orchestra and wave my hands around, but the players make the actual music.  Both coach and conductor relate to an inspiring comment about editing I learned reading “Max Perkins, Editor of Genius,” A. Scott Berg’s masterful biography of the editor of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, among others. Perkins said an editor “releases energy.” Not creates, not controls. Perkins said releases. That’s the goal.

What’s the best piece of editing advice anyone ever gave you?

The best advice I ever got concerning wordcraft—management is another issue--came from the late and legendary writing coach Jim Hayes. He said, “Put the best stuff at the end of the sentence.” Jim showed me how he could improve a sentence not by adding or deleting words, but by rearranging their order. I’m not shy about snipping or adding words. Sometimes that’s necessary. But I’ve found that if a sentence can end with gusto, that helps story organization, keeps the sentences bouncing and flings the reader into the next sentence. It’s such a simple idea but I’d never had anyone express it so simply. That was the other lesson from Jim: to offer writing guidance in clear, sentence-level terms.

Now a disclaimer, at least for journalistic writing: Yes, some sentences must end with “according to documents,” or “police said Thursday,” but the words just before those should be powerful, interesting or important. I’ve found that much of my coaching emphasizes word order and that the payoffs are almost immediate. And there’s another value to rearranging words, versus overhauling a whole sentence: it still sounds like the writer, only better.

CRAFT LESSON | UNFORCED ERRORS

Have you ever appeared in a newspaper and found your name was misspelled? Maybe it was a friend or family member whose name was mispelled.  

Errors like this are infuriating. Even heartbreaking, especially when the mistake occurs in an obituary. That’s the only time most people will ever appear in the news. Loved ones post these stories of life and death in the family Bible, a picture frame, even on the fridge, to keep memories alive. 

CREDIBILITY IS THE PRODUCT

A misspelling isn’t just a mistake. These kinds of unforced errors damage the essential trust between you and your audience.  If you can’t get the little things right, people say, why should we trust you with the big things you report? 

The product news organizations have to sell isn’t a newspaper, news show, or even advertising. It’s credibility. That’s even more true in the digital age when anyone with a computer and an internet hookup can be a publisher, opinions masquerading as truth zip around social media and politicians and talk show hosts debate the existence of facts. 

A RECIPE FOR MISTAKES

Drastic cuts in newsroom staffs, especially editors, and regionalization increase the chance of mistakes.

Shifting copy editing and designing pages for The Winston Salem (NC) Journal to a consolidated editing and design center seventy-three miles away so troubled managing editor Ken Otterbourg that it was one of the reasons he quit in 2010, according to a 2013 case study published by The Poynter Institute.

 “I didn’t think it was good for our paper,” said Otterbourg. “There’s nothing more to it than saving money.”

Management defended the practice. But the study noted that while its journalists “are supposed to catch obvious misspellings, it’s not their job to research the names of individuals, streets or companies to confirm obscure spellings.” That’s a recipe for a correction and a dip in reader confidence.

No one is perfect, of course. The best journalists I know are terrified of making mistakes—“error terror,” one calls it. But your readers and viewers won’t cut you any slack. Surveys show the public anticipates the news media will be accurate, even though they lack confidence that they get the facts straight. 

“How do you sift through the rumors, the gossip, the failed memories, the manipulative agendas, and try to capture something as accurately as possible, subject to revision in light of new information and perspective?” Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel ask in The Elements of Journalism. "These are the real questions faced daily by those who try to gather news, understand it, and convey it to others.” 

WHY MISTAKES ARE MADE 

Editors at The Oregonian of Portland tracked errors their staff made. The three most frequent sources: 

1. Working from memory

2. Making assumptions

3. Dealing with second-hand sources 

The solution, Kovach and Rosenstiel say, is to adopt accuracy checklists, found in their book and online. National Public Radio has the most comprehensive one. 

HOW TO CANCEL ERROR TERROR

• Check and recheck every fact in a story against your notes or public records.  The “discipline of verification” is “the beating heart of credible journalism in the public interest,” Kovach and Rosenstiel say.

• Triple-check every fact: name, age, address, statistic, quotes, etc. Pulitzer Prize-winner Thomas French routinely puts a red checkmark over every word in his stories, some of them thousands of words long, to show he’d compared it against his notes. 

• Verify. If you’re describing a business transaction, a scientific breakthrough or how a municipal bond works, there’s nothing wrong with calling your sources back. Read them what you’ve written. They’ll not only set you straight, French found. Often, they gave him even better information. 

WRITING TO SAVOR | “IN ONE SMALL PRAIRIE TOWN, TWO WARRING VISIONS OF AMERICA” BY TIM SULLIVAN, ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tim Sullivan, a longtime foreign correspondent for the AP now based in Minnesota, goes to the street level in the “wind-scarred prairie town” of Benson (pop. 3,000) to tell a vivid story of how vaccine battles and other partisan stances have reached beyond the Beltway to inner America. He trains his focus on a newspaper editor committed to telling the truth and a Lutheran pastor who’s convinced vaccines kill. It’s a well-told, but dispiriting tale that brings to mind the themes of Main Street, Sinclair Lewis’s classic dissection of small-town culture. It’s not just a war of words; the threat of violence hangs in the air. The dominant response on social media has focused on the sadness the story evokes about the divided state of our nation.

TIP OF THE WEEK | FINISH THE STORY YOU’VE WRITTEN, EVEN IF YOU HATE IT

If you’re struggling with the end of your story, my advice is to write an ending, even if it doesn’t satisfy you. Doing that does two things: it gives you an idea of what to foreshadow at the top, and suggests a destination to reach. Very often you’ll find that a satisfying ending lurks two or three grafs above your intended ending, an example of the upstream theory of problem-solving. I learned this approach working for eight years with Joel Rawson of The Providence Journal. Invariably, on narrative stories, he would point his finger two or three grafs up from what I thought was my obvious conclusion, say, “Your story ends here,” and make that the kicker. He was always right.

BEFORE YOU GO

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