Chip's Writing Lessons #78

Newsletter

• Writers Speak | John D. Sutter on transparency

• Interview | 4 Questions with Russell Working

• Craft Lesson | Cut-and-Paste jobs

• Writing to Savor | “The ‘Miracle Boy’ of Surfside,” by Matt Sullivan, Rolling Stone, June 23, 2022

• Book World | A new colleague in Bangladesh

• Tip of the Week | Make friends with a co-reader

• Help Royal Hospitallers save lives in Ukraine

WRITERS SPEAK

“Reporting— investigative or not—is often served by transparency. If you tell people what you’re working on, where you are, and what you’re stumped by, they’re much more likely to help you out.”

– John D. Sutter

INTERVIEW | 4 QUESTIONS WITH RUSSELL WORKING

Russell Working, a former Chicago Tribune staff reporter, is the Pushcart Prize-winning author of two fiction collections: Resurrectionists, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Irish Martyr, winner of the University of Notre Dame’s Sullivan Award.

Russell holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. As a former newspaper reporter, he has freelanced stories from throughout Russia, China, the Philippines, Central Asia, the Middle East, and aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt. He and his wife, a Russian journalist, have two sons.

He has had bylines in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, BusinessWeek, The Baltimore Sun, The Jerusalem Post, The Japan Times, CJR and scores of other publications worldwide. His fiction and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, Zoetrope: All-Story, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere.

He has twice won the Hackney Literary Award for the novel. Other honors include Crab Orchard Review’s story prize, and two first places in Narrative magazine story contests.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?

Go. See. Do. Be present. Participate. Observe. Make your writing more than a desk job. Make it a journey of exploration: Teddy Roosevelt up the Amazon, Ernest Shackleton on the frozen Weddell Sea, Jane Goodall in Gombe Stream, Tanzania. Don’t just imagine, don’t rely on the internet; go find the scenes you are writing about and talk to the people who can give you insight into your characters. Investigate the worlds you want to bring to light, whether it’s a corner barbershop or the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.

If you are writing a murder mystery, do you know how your villain’s firearm works? Have you loaded a pistol or a revolver and shot it on the range? If you are putting a sermon in the mouth of a preacher, have you listened to one lately, read the Bible or the Quran, played an audiobook version of Father Mapple’s stemwinder in Moby-Dick?

I tried to get at some of these thoughts in “Zola’s Horse,” a lecture I delivered at Vermont College of Fine Arts, later repackaged as an essay for Numero Cinq.

Man-on-the-street interviews are a genre that gets you out in the community. Yet working for a series of small and medium papers, I grew tired of gathering quotes on local issues from semi-informed everyday Joes. So I made a point of looking for people doing something that would be fun to describe. Get quotes about the city council’s new budget from the guy jackhammering the sidewalk or the panhandler tossing peanuts to the pet spider monkey he keeps on a leash.

Dave Barry revealed a mastery of this art in his Pulitzer Prize-winning piece for The Miami Herald, “Can New York save itself?”

"As Chuck and I walk along 42nd Street, we see a person wearing an enormous frankfurter costume, handing out coupons good for discounts at Nathan's Famous hot dog stands. His name is Victor Leise, age 19, of Queens, and he has held the position of giant frankfurter for four months. He says he didn't have any connections or anything; he just put in an application and, boom, the job was his. Sheer luck. He says it's OK work, although people call him “Frank” and sometimes sneak up and whack him on the back. Also there is not a lot of room for advancement. They have no hamburger costume.

"Can New York save itself ?" I ask him.

"If there are more cops on the streets, there could be a possibility," he says, through his breathing hole."

What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?

Winning the Iowa Short Fiction Award in 1986, when I was twenty-six, the youngest winner of that prize. (The book came out a year later.) I was a reporter for a smalltown newspaper in Oregon, and although I was getting encouraging letters from The Atlantic and The New Yorker, I had never published a short story anywhere. When John Leggett, director of the Iowa Writers Workshop, phoned me with the good news, my heart was pounding so hard, I could barely gasp, “Really?”

He seemed to take this as a lack of enthusiasm, and said, “This is a very major award, you know.” I croaked, “I ... I know.” He hung up, no doubt appalled at my ingratitude, unaware that I was now leaping about my apartment. Then immediately I told myself it couldn’t possibly be true. It was a prank! But who knew I had applied? Not my old college friends. Not my fellow reporters at the paper where I worked; I kept my fiction writing to myself, fearing they would consider it frivolous. My girlfriend had proofread the manuscript, but she wouldn’t be so cruel as to get somebody to punk me like this. The next morning I phoned the Iowa Writers Workshop, and the receptionist laughed at my doubts and assured me I really had won.

I told our managing editor that I had grabbed the award and would be having a book published. He said, “Type up a brief.” I had to admit I was lucky to get even this, there being far less interest in my little triumph than all those meth lab busts and forest fires and school tax base elections.

If you had to choose a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why?

A knight errant in full armor on a bicycle (see Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court). Why? My wife sees me as a lonely warrior, battling dragons when I get up at 4 a.m. every day to write fiction. (It helps that I’m an insomniac.) But there’s a ridiculous aspect to the whole enterprise, both in the audacity of imagining the minds of very different people, and in the graphomania that keeps one toiling for years on end for a lower hourly pay than convicts earn stamping license plates.

What's the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?

I had just graduated from college as an English major when I somehow talked myself into a newspaper internship on the Longview (Washington) Daily Courier. After a week of repairing my hopelessly roundabout stories, my city editor, David Connelly, sat me down in the morgue and said he was going to teach me how to write a lede. He got out a copy of The Wall Street Journal and pointed to the feature in the center column on page one.

Do it like that, he said. Grab the reader’s attention with the opening line, then drop in a quote, then add a “nut graf” telling the reader why the story was important. Of course, this would be too formulaic for fiction, but something about it connected with me as a literary writer. Establish a conflict right away. Add dialogue. Tell us the stakes—why this matters, what’s at risk for the central characters, why we should read it. Starting out strong is all the more important in the age of smartphones and streaming video. We are at war for readers’ attention. Strike quickly.

This editor also influenced my thinking in my answer to your first question. When Washington state passed a law requiring mandatory jail sentences for drunken drivers, Connelly came to me and said, “How’d you like to go to jail?” He had concocted a scheme to slip me in undercover; only the warden would be aware who I was. Cowlitz County Jail wasn’t Rikers Island, but I was terrified. Nevertheless, I said, “Sure.” I would spend twenty-four hours in cells that included burglars, wife-beaters, meth addicts, and a murderer. I emerged unscathed, and no doubt in far less danger than I imagined, but it made for a thrilling immersion into a criminal world unknown to me as a young writer.

CRAFT LESSON | CUT-AND-PASTE JOBS

Plagiarism, the theft of another writer’s words and ideas, is one of journalism’s cardinal sins. Ryan Broderick learned that the hard way.

In 2020, he lost his job as senior reporter at the news website BuzzFeed after an investigation determined 11 of his articles had been plagiarized or incorrectly attributed to other sources, according to The Wall Street Journal.

“It is BuzzFeed News’ policy that nothing may be copied, pasted, and passed off as one’s own work, and that all quotes should be attributed,” Buzzfeed’s Editor-in-Chief Mark Schoofs wrote readers. “We regret that in these instances those standards were not met.”

Journalists had been stealing words before, of course, but the cut-and-paste functions on word processors that emerged in the 1970s have made it a snap to lift another’s prose.

At a time when so much research is conducted on the internet, some journalists find the allure of purloined words hard to resist.

You’re researching a story on the internet and come across a well-crafted sentence or paragraph that fits your piece perfectly. It’s better than anything you have.

IGNORE THE TEMPTATION

You’re tempted.

With a few keystrokes, you could easily lift the material and paste it into your story. You can change a few words around, thinking that the theft won’t be obvious. Or you come across a lively quote. This time, you pass it off as your own.

“Never plagiarize,” the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics says flat out. Your news organization probably echoes the sentiment in its stylebook.

And remember, the same computer systems that embolden word theft can also be turned on the offender by searching databases for borrowed materials.

The common excuses plagiarists trot out—haste, sloppy note-taking, deadline pressure—won’t always save you. Plagiarism can be the equivalent of a career death sentence.

The ethical choice, and one that will protect you from dire punishment: do your own original reporting. If you still want to use another’s words directly, attribute them to the source, paraphrase them and include where the information came from.

There’s a simple solution, one that I lay out in my journalism textbook “Reporting and Writing: Basics for the 21st Century. “If you think you should attribute it, then attribute it,” says Thomas Mallon, author of “Stolen Words,” an engaging history of plagiarism.

“Manage your time wisely,” my book continues. “Plagiarism is a desperate act. Writers behind on a deadline, exhausted, and anxious, may delude themselves into believing that what they’re doing is nothing more than a shortcut. Be honest about where you got your information.”

If Ryan Broderick had followed the rule, he’d still have his job.

WRITING TO SAVOR | “THE ‘MIRACLE BOY” OF SURFSIDE,” BY MATT SULLIVAN, ROLLING STONE, JUNE 23, 2022

On June 24, 2021, Champlain Towers South, a 12-story beachfront condominium in the Miami suburb of Surfside, Florida partially collapsed, killing 98 people. Rescuers pulled four people (only three survived) from the mountain of rubble. The first was 15-year-old Jonah Handler. Trapped with him was his mother, Stacie Dawn Fang, who didn’t make it. Two years later, Matt Sullivan delivers a muscular immersive narrative of how Jonah’s doing. Sullivan focuses intently on the teen and his father’s efforts to help free his son from crippling PTSD and then takes the reader on the journey of how Jonah became the linchpin of a billion-dollar settlement for the survivors. It’s a remarkably engrossing and empathetic story, told with literary grace.

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THE BOOK WORLD | A NEW COLLEAUGE IN BANGLADESH

For more than two weeks, my publisher Melissa Wilson valiantly, but in vain, tried to correct a persistent glitch on the cover of my new book, 33 Ways Not To Screw Up Your Journalism, that kept me from Ingram Spark, the largest print distributor in the country.

More importantly, it’s the go-to destination for schools wishing to adopt a text and bookstores wanting to stock their shelves or provide copies to customers looking for a particular book. Those two are the markets I need to crack if I am to achieve my long-shot goal: get the book in the hands of every reporter, editor, student, journalism professor and coach. Its 33 tools, techniques and values are needed by journalists “of all ages and experience,” as Dan Rather says on the cover, more than ever in our fractured and fact-tossed democracy, I believe.

Our best option to solve the problelm was the gig economy, the vast constellation of freelancers available internationally on sites like fivver and UpWork. Through Upwork, I connected with Akramul, a talented graphic designer in Bangladesh. (You search for possible helpers and decide, based on their success rate and price; Akramul charged a flat rate of $40 and assured success. He came through in two days. I also gave him a $15 bonus.

Finally, my book will be available for distributon on Ingram Spark. I’m waiting to get a copy in my hands to check for any errors before I ask IS to launch it into the world.

All in all, a good week.

TIP OF THE WEEK| MAKE FRIENDS WITH A CO-READER

I apologize for the the typos in my recent newsletters. As hard as I try and despite careful reading and even having my computer read the text aloud to me, they slip past me. So I’ve come to rely on my in-house editor who has an eagle eye for gremlins hatched by haste and distraction. She’s a co-reader, which I define as someone who will read and respond to your drafts without making you want to throw your computer out the window. I think there’s always someone in your writing life who will fill that goal, especially if you offer to reciprocrate. Before you hit publish, give your co-reader a printout. Don’t be precious about your work. If my editor thinks something needs cutting, I delete. My stories are always better for it. And from now on will, I hope, be gremlin-free. Ah, but you know gremlins, they’re tenacious suckers.

HELP UKRAINIAN PARAMEDICS SAVE LIVES

Royal Hospitallers, Ukrainian's brave volunteer paramedic battalion, save lives every day. Please support them here!

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Thanks for reading. See you in two weeks.

May your writing go well.

Chip