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“Why’s this so good?” No. 27: Christopher Goffard tracks love in flight

by Mark Johnson | January 10, 2012

One drawer of my desk – the largest – contains a mound of stories, the best I’ve found in newspapers and magazines over the last 20 years. In addition, three or four “great writing” folders float around the top of my work space; faux-wood fragments of the desktop are seldom visible.

Then there are a handful of individual stories I value enough to keep beside my keyboard at all times. When I’m struggling, when writing feels like running in mud, I go to one of these stories, start to read a page or two and then end up reading the whole thing. For some reason, it helps. Amazing work is possible, even if it feels beyond my own grasp.

Since I first read it in May 2009, Christopher Goffard’s narrative “Fleeing all but each other” from the L.A. Times has been among the treasured handful. I remember reading it, handing it to my wife and saying something like: You have to read this now.

So why do I reread it every few months, and why does it inspire me each time?

The story, about a young couple who hop trains together, seeking an alternative to an adult life of routine and responsibility, is tightly written – just 2,401 words. Early on, in just a few brush strokes, Goffard makes the two main characters, Adam Kuntz and Ashley Hughes, real:

He was 22, tall and rangy, with a goatee, wild black hair and a disarming smile. She was 18, with blue eyes and dishwater-blond hair. Crudely inked across her fingers was the word “sourpuss,” advertising the side she liked to show people: the rebel and sometime dope fiend who bristled with free-floating anger.

But he saw another side of her too: the frightened runaway who, like him, found a tramp’s dangerous, hand-to-mouth life less terrifying than the adult world.

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Ben Montgomery on a cold case: building a story and taking names

This week’s Notable Narrative recounts the murder of Claude Neal by a lynch mob in 1934 and introduces his family, which has been waiting for decades for someone to name the killers and hold them to account. Tampa Bay Times reporter Ben Montgomery talked with us by phone this week about reporting and writing “Spectacle: the lynching of Claude Neal.” Here are excerpts from our conversation.

There was a line in your piece that made me think you had been working on it since 2009, when you were in Marianna doing “For Their Own Good.” Is that true?

It is. I was spending a lot of time in Jackson County then. You talk to enough people, and pretty soon that story surfaces.

So you don’t remember where you first heard about it?

It may have been as simple as the Marianna, Fla., Wikipedia page. I can’t really recall. I do remember originally thinking it was potentially a story when I was in a hotel room in Jackson County on a “For Their Own Good” reporting trip, and I was just doing some research online. There’s a branch of CNN’s website called “iReport,” or something like that – it allows some kind of citizen interactivity. It was a solitary, random post from Orlando Williams saying, “We need a reporter to take a look to try to figure out who is responsible for the 1934 lynching of my uncle Claude Neal.”

Montgomery working on “Spectacle.” (Click to enlarge.)

I thought, “Well, there’s a willing descendant who could maybe help me tell the story.” So I emailed him originally, and he was completely on board. I was shocked to learn that this had such a large impact at the time. It ran on the front page of the New York Times but had been almost forgotten. Nobody had ever been brought to account for this barbaric act of terrorism. I thought maybe I can take a shot at it, all these years later.

Had the paper already committed to a story on it, or did the FBI involvement in 2011 make the difference?

No, no. We didn’t know anything about the FBI until I had already spent about – obviously I work on different things all the time – but I had invested about a year of reporting on Claude Neal before I heard anything about the FBI’s involvement.

It’s useful for people to know about the time in. It’s not like you can go down, spend a week, and come up with a story like this.

We thought it was a story from the very beginning. It randomly happened that the FBI decided, for the first time in 76 years, to open the case.

When it came to writing, did you think a lot about how to describe the place, the setting?

It’s one of the great challenges in doing historic narrative nonfiction, connecting people in 2011 to a small town in Florida in 1934. How on earth do you do that? So we started in the present, but I wanted, in that section where we kick it back to ’34, I wanted to very quickly, in almost a pretty way – it’s not necessarily poetic, but in some fluid, pretty way – to rattle off this list of items that might help people connect to that time period. … I wanted in this tangible way to immediately stick people in that time period, sort of creating a mental collage of items from that era, with prices as well, give a sampling of what it was like, of how they existed.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jan 6, 2012 | posted in words | comments (1)
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The Tampa Bay Times unearths a tale of grief and justice denied

Our latest Notable Narrative, “Spectacle: the lynching of Claude Neal,” comes from Ben Montgomery of the Tampa Bay Times.

Montgomery reports that Neal, a 23-year-old African-American farmhand, was arrested in 1934 on suspicion of the rape and murder of a young white woman. Hidden from white mobs for days, he was eventually taken at gunpoint from a jailer. A lynching party was set up; invitations were issued. The governor of Florida, along with millions of others, knew of the publicly announced plans to kill Neal, but no state or federal investigators intervened in Florida. What happened afterward was horrific. No one was ever arrested or prosecuted.

The narrative sticks with the third person, and the writing is subdued and steady, as if to say, It’s okay, you can keep reading. I’ll be right here with you. The story is rooted deeply in place, and Montgomery evokes the landscape and the era in one beautifully compact paragraph.

Jackson County, Florida, 1934: Drip coffee, Purity Ice Cream, turnips, chuck roast, mustard for 15 cents a quart, 26 cents for a dozen eggs. Sun-bleached overalls, Baptists, Methodists, kerosene lamps, screen doors, mosquitoes, pine trees, knee stains, brick chimneys, K & K Grocery, and cotton, 12 cents a pound. Cotton on the roadside and cotton in the ditch and cotton in forever rows stretched across fields flat as tabletops.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Jan 5, 2012 | posted in notable narratives | comments (1)

Audio danger: stories from the edge of listening

by Julia Barton | January 4, 2012

[As part of our mission to look at storytelling in every medium, Storyboard is pleased to introduce Julia Barton, who will bring us several posts in 2012 focused on developments in and examples from the world of audio narratives. –Ed.]

Writers and video producers live in dread of the wandering eye. Audio producers live for it. That’s what makes us, in our secret hearts, troublemakers. We want you to lose sight of everything in front of your face: to stare through that dish in your hand, ignore your children, drop into a glazed-over trance of our making. Maybe don’t drive off the road, but please do miss a few exits or get stuck in your car. Good audio should be dangerous that way.

But it’s very hard to accomplish, especially these days, when more and more audio comes to us via that distraction machine, the Web. Hence these posts. In the Storyboard spirit, I’ll be talking with audio producers and editors about how they accomplish their best stories, what obstacles they’ve overcome and the strategies they’ve learned along the way. I should point out that conversations about audio craft have long been underway on sites like Transom and airmedia.org. And there’s a great new podcast, “How Sound,” from longtime audio instructor Rob Rosenthal, who also interviews intrepid producers. In the posts I’ll be doing for Storyboard, I’ll simply be adding to (and sometimes echoing) all those worthy explorations.

I got my start in radio in 1995, while pursuing a master’s degree in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa. Doing airshifts at WSUI, the university’s then-analog AM public radio station, was for me just an amusing side trip on the way to a blurry future in magazine writing. But then we started airing a new show, “This American Life,” at 6 a.m. on my Sunday shift. I had a huge list of things to do during that hour, but I kept forgetting about my impending newscast and listening to the radio instead. The stories, at once mesmerizing and funny and surprising, actually endangered my work. So I had to start putting TAL on cassettes to hear later, like a portable, or pocket – or what’s the word? – cast.

Since those days, I’ve been a radio reporter, an editor, and contributor to such programs as PRI’s “Studio 360” and “The World.” Still, every time I sit down to craft a new audio feature, it feels almost as hard as the first time. Every piece is its own hellish puzzle.

That said, audio – especially broadcast radio – is a pretty conservative medium. Listeners appreciate familiarity and tend to punish experimentation (see below for one example). On the upside, I really don’t have to try anything new. On the downside: well, not to offend anyone, but there are plenty of places on the low FM band where, format wise, it remains 1979. That’s fine for many; I don’t want it to be fine for me.

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“Why’s this so good?” No. 26: Moehringer KO’s a mystery

by Tommy Tomlinson | January 3, 2012

The hell with my lede. Let’s start with his:

I’m sitting in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, waiting for a call from a man who doesn’t trust me, hoping he’ll have answers about a man I don’t trust, which may clear the name of a man no one gives a damn about.

That’s how J.R. Moehringer begins “Resurrecting the Champ,” the greatest newspaper story ever written, and if you’re not hooked by the time the period slams that sentence shut, God knows why you’re here.

I’ve read this story at least 100 times since it appeared in the L.A. Times Magazine* in 1997, and my bones still ache with envy. Moehringer has command of all the storyteller’s tools here – rhythm, pacing, metaphor – and I’ve spent many an hour taking the story apart like an old radio.

But what I love about this story the most is a simple thing that shows up in far too few nonfiction narratives:

Mystery.

That lede echoes Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and all those noir movies of the ’40s (Fred MacMurray in “Double Indemnity”: I killed him for money. And for a woman. And I didn’t get the money. And I didn’t get the woman.)

Moehringer gets a tip: A former heavyweight contender named Bob Satterfield – known for jackhammer punches and a tinfoil chin – is walking the streets of Santa Ana, homeless. Moehringer goes looking for him, almost gives up, then sees an old man, toothless and filthy – but with hands so big they hang from his sides like bowling balls. Moehringer approaches him.

“You’re Bob Satterfield, aren’t you?” I said.

“Battlin’ Bob Satterfield!” he said, delighted at being recognized.

And then what happens is…

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Nieman Storyboard’s top 10 posts for 2011

During the last days of December, we’ve been tweeting down Storyboard’s top 10 posts for the year. In case you haven’t been following along, here they are, all in one place (in reverse order):

10. Internet phenom Maud Newton’s “Why’s this so good?”:

“Raymond Chandler sticks it to Hollywood.”

9. Chris Jones, Esquire writer at large, talks with Nieman narrative instructor Paige Williams:

“On reporting for detail, the case against outlining and the power of donuts.”

8. Storyboard editor Andrea Pitzer’s “Why’s this so good?”:

“Gene Weingarten peels the Great Zucchini.”

7. Peter Ginna, publisher and editorial director of Bloomsbury Press, with

“When journalists become authors: a few cautionary tips.”

6. Science and culture writer David Dobbs’ “Why’s this so good?”:

“Michael Lewis’ Greek odyssey.”

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by Andrea Pitzer | Dec 30, 2011 | posted in narrative news | comments (0)
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“Why’s this so good?” No. 25: Nick Paumgarten’s tower of terror

by Michelle Legro | December 20, 2011

A few days ago I stepped onto an elevator, heading out for an afternoon coffee. The repairman was there, his tools spread out on the floor. Come on in, he said, pressing the “door close” button and whistling a short tweet. Somewhere above us, a whistle back, and we started to move. Hey-yo! Someone shouted. The voice was came from above, and it didn’t fade away. Hey-yo! the repairman shouted back. He’s up top, he said, pointing to the ceiling, where his partner was riding on the outside of the elevator. They shouted a few pleasantries back and forth. They seemed to be having fun.

At about 10am on the same day, a woman stepped into an elevator at 285 Madison Avenue. Halfway in, on the threshold where most people stop to hold the door open, the car shot up and pinned her to the roof. The two passengers were trapped with her body for over an hour.

That night I sat down again with one of the most frightening, banal, effed-up, claustrophobic, and crazy-good pieces of nonfiction I’ve ever read: “Up and Then Down,” Nick Paumgarten’s 2008 history of elevators from The New Yorker. If you’ve never read it, perhaps you’ve heard about the story, another it-will-never-happen-to-me urban legend turned reality: In the fall of 1999, Nicholas White, a production editor at Business Week, enters an elevator at the McGraw-Hill building to go out for an evening smoke and leaves it 41 hours later.

Elevators are the most horrible places imaginable about two percent of their time. For the other ninety-eight percent of the time, elevators have little sex appeal, and so do 8,000-word features on them. It’s a New Yorker staple, these masterworks that reveal the sudden canonical purpose of leaf blowers, or coffee beans, or online dating, or pencil erasers. On a recent episode of “Parks and Recreation,” a character uses a (fake) New Yorker article about the history of ladders to neutralize the sexual tension between coworkers. It works.

Then again, the banality of the thing is often the best challenge there is. Hey journalist, you want a good opening? Start with a man getting into an elevator alone. The elevator stops. Now go:

He occupied himself with thoughts of remaining calm and decided that he’d better not do anything drastic, because, whatever the malfunction, he thought it unwise to jostle the car, and because he wanted to be (as he thought, chuckling to himself) a model trapped employee. He hoped, once someone came to get him, to appear calm and collected. He did not want to be scolded for endangering himself or harming company property. Nor did he want to be caught smoking, should the doors suddenly open, so he didn’t touch his cigarettes. He still had three, plus two Rolaids, which he worried might dehydrate him, so he left them alone. As the emergency bell rang and rang, he began to fear that it might somehow—electricity? friction? heat?—start a fire. Recently, there had been a small fire in the building, rendering the elevators unusable. The Business Week staff had walked down forty-three stories. He also began hearing unlikely oscillations in the ringing: aural hallucinations. Before long, he began to contemplate death.

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December Editors’ Roundtable: Vanity Fair on U.S. money trouble

Our last Roundtable of 2011 considers “California and Bust,” in which superstar business reporter Michael Lewis turns his keen eye away from analyzing European financial problems, looking instead toward the mountain of debt in his home country. The story ran in the November issue of Vanity Fair.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

In “California and Bust,” Michael Lewis uses a bike ride with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a narrative thread, a reporting technique and a metaphor.

Narrative thread. Notice how Lewis starts his section on Arnold with a scene: They meet in the early morning for the bike ride. Lewis then alternates between scenes of the bike ride and expository paragraphs that explain the challenges that Arnold faced as governor. Lewis presents the action with constant motion and precise details. In this passage, pay attention to how the action pulls the reader through the story and adds a bit of suspense.

He hauls a bike off the back of the car, hops on, and takes off down an already busy Ocean Avenue. He wears no bike helmet, runs red lights, and rips past do not enter signs without seeming to notice them and up one-way streets the wrong way. When he wants to cross three lanes of fast traffic he doesn’t so much as glance over his shoulder but just sticks out his hand and follows it, assuming that whatever is behind him will stop. His bike has at least 10 speeds, but he has just 2: zero and pedaling as fast as he can. Inside half a mile he’s moving fast enough that wind-induced tears course down his cheeks.

Reporting technique. Lewis also uses the bike ride as a way to get closer access to Arnold. The ex-governor doesn’t seem to be that reflective a person. Getting him moving and comfortable in his own element – all of that helps the reporter put the subject at ease. The chaotic bike ride also puts Lewis in a vulnerable position, which can also help lower the defenses of people with large egos – like Arnold. In this passage, pay attention to how coming upon a tall brick wall triggers a memory for Arnold – and a revealing anecdote for Lewis’ story.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Dec 16, 2011 | posted in editors' roundtable | comments (0)
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When journalists become authors: a few cautionary tips

by Peter Ginna | December 15, 2011

There’s long-form narrative, and then there’s book-length narrative. Both are “long,” but a story that’s 300 pages long is a different proposition, for both writer and reader, from one that’s 3,000 words.

Writers embarking on their first book-length project respond to the challenge in different ways. Some panic, staring blankly at their screen as fine beads of sweat form on their foreheads. Some luxuriate in the expanse of real estate and begin wandering to and fro around their subject, leaving no random thought unexpressed. Some try to take a 3,000-word piece and inflate it to 300 pages.

In a few decades as a book editor I have published journalists, historians and novelists. In this post I’ll identify some problems that I see often in manuscripts or outlines of book-length nonfiction.

#1 WEAK STRUCTURE

A story that’s 800, or even 5,000, words can often carry the reader through on the strength of an incredible event, investigative breakthroughs, or even bitingly ironic prose. A “narrative arc” may be unnecessary. But to draw readers and hold them for a full-length book, time-honored structures still work best: introduce a core character or group of characters who have some kind of goal or objective, follow them as they pursue that objective, and tell us how they succeed or fail. (In Storyboard’s recent Q&A with Jack Hart, he offered a brilliantly concise description of a narrative arc.)

Some structures don’t work because they are too episodic. This is often a problem with history books or others that cover a long period of time. The story consists of a sequence of events, but they don’t lead compellingly from one to the next; suspense is dissipated at the end of each episode.

A telltale marker of the episodic failing is that there are no central characters threaded through the whole narrative – the characters may be vibrant in themselves, but they cycle out of the story after a chapter or two and don’t reappear. Characters are the vessels that carry the reader’s interest and emotional involvement through the story. If they disappear offstage just when we’ve gotten to know them, our emotional investment is lost.

Some structures don’t work because they are anticlimactic. The point of resolution comes too early in the narrative, and – no matter how important the consequences of that resolution – readers lose interest in a story where there’s no suspense about the outcome.

Sometimes authors (biographers, I’m lookin’ at you) are tempted to use a thematic structure. They want to write about their subject’s womanizing, say, so instead of threading every extramarital affair into the ongoing storyline, it seems simpler to give the topic a chapter of its own. This may be perfectly valid, and allow a deeper discussion of what links the affairs together. But it tends to kill narrative momentum. A whole book of thematically organized chapters is really a long essay, not “narrative nonfiction.”

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When I write the book: Nieman Reports on journalists who wrestle with long long-form

The Winter issue of Nieman Reports, with the theme “Writing the Book,” is now online. It includes contributions from digital publishers, narrative writers, and a passel of journalists who have gone on to tackle book-length projects. Here are a few highlights:

In “Writing a Life, Living a Writer’s Life,” former Nieman fellow Gaiutra Bahadur recounts her pursuit of her family’s story and a book contract that would give her a chance to tell it.

“It’s a Long Article. It’s a Short Book. No, It’s a Byliner E-Book” is Byliner founder and CEO John Tayman’s look at a new publishing model, and a way to pull audiences toward an author’s entire body of work.

Mitchell Zuckoff traces the path from inspiration to research to story (and sometimes even switching stories) in “Feeling It’s a Book, Then Pausing To Wonder If It Is.”

In “Novels Win Out Over Journalism,” William Dietrich, another former Nieman fellow, talks about the transition from journalism to book-length nonfiction and fiction.

For more, head over and read the full issue at our sister site. And check back tomorrow for our contribution to Book Week: “When journalists become authors: a few cautionary tips,” by Bloomsbury Press publisher and editorial director Peter Ginna.

by Andrea Pitzer | Dec 14, 2011 | posted in words | comments (0)
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