Nieman Storyboard - A project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard » Maria Carrillo

February Editors’ Roundtable: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on patients’ rights

Andrea Pitzer — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:40:44 +0000

Our February Roundtable looks at “Law creates barriers to getting care for mentally ill,” by Meg Kissinger. In her narrative, Kissinger touches on violence, mental health and 40 years of debates over patients’ rights. The story of Martha Wilson, who feared the violence her son might commit, is paired with that of Alberta Lessard, whose struggle to maintain her own rights went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Part of a multimedia project from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Kissinger’s story was assigned by George Stanley, the paper’s managing editor, and edited by Greg Borowski.

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

On stories that teach and reach:

A cornerstone of effective narrative is to invite empathy through the capture of universal emotion and authentic drama. Meg Kissinger does that here, and with one of the toughest of subjects. Mental illness isn’t something that is easy to relate to for those who don’t suffer from it or aren’t intimately connected to it.

But the real genius of Kissinger’s piece lies in how she uses the narrative not just to evoke emotion, but to teach. Her deep reporting and deft weave of story and context takes readers through an important tour of the history, law, politics, policy and economics of society’s attempts to deal with the mentally ill. It’s a classic example of “teachable moment” journalism – Kissinger uses a compelling storyline to crack open understanding of shared systems. She lays out that aspect of her package with the simplicity that only comes from bulletproof reporting.

I was lured into Kissinger’s piece with the heartbreaking introduction to the Wilson family and the quick reminders of the horrors that played out at Virginia Tech and a Tucson shopping center. Spare use of the right numbers highlighted the enormity of this issue. Then the grabber – a tight but sophisticated “nut” section where Kissinger lays out the contrast between our reactions to physical and mental illness, and delivers a quick litany of “whys” – sets up that perfect hook:

The answer begins 40 years ago on the second-story window sill of Alberta Lessard’s West Allis apartment.

From there I am not just being taken into the tragic story of one family, I’m on a quest – almost an archeological dig through courtrooms and records and memories. Kissinger doesn’t leave us with the frustration of where we are, but helps us understand how we got here. Along the way, she reveals how the best of social intentions that drove the civil liberties movements of the 1960s and ’70s set the table for unintended consequences today. This is the stuff of elite, book-length journalism. Bless her heart, Kissinger gives it to us in the daily fishwrap.

That approach reminded me of two other remarkable works that used intimate stories to teach bigger social truths:

In “And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic,” published in 1987, Randy Shilts went on a hunt for “Patient Zero.” He reported around the world to try to track down the origin of HIV’s sudden spread. (Shilts died of HIV/AIDS in 1994. His book is a movie of the same name.) Alberta Lessard is the “patient zero” in Kissinger’s story, and helps us track the origins of decisions that determine how we deal with the mentally ill.

In 1996, The Oregonian’s Tom Hallman Jr. wrote “Children of a Lesser Hope,” a groundbreaking piece on children being raised by developmentally disabled parents. Hallman found a small program for normal-intelligence children who, often by the age of 5, had surpassed their parents’ ability to read, make change and navigate society. This was a subset of children born after society banned the forced sterilization of those deemed incompetent, including those long called mentally retarded. As with Kissinger’s piece, it was a glimpse at the unforeseen consequences of a good social intention.

I could cite other examples. For my lights, this is the best use of narrative journalism. It doesn’t just engage – it educates and enlightens. In terms of service and relevance, it runs parallel to the best of investigative journalism. No matter the story, certain elements are always present:

Deep, layered reporting. The sourcing box to Kissinger’s story shows how far she went to get it right.
A clear, tight focus. Kissinger doesn’t try to tell it all. Instead, she layers information in support of a primary question.
A view of history. Kissinger doesn’t just look at the moment in front of her, but wonders what led up to that moment, and where it might go next.
The right, relatable characters. The reader has to feel some genuine connection to the people who shine light on the bigger issue. Kissinger found that in the Wilson family.
A disciplined story structure and writing. Kissinger didn’t rely on tricks and flourishes; her elegance is in her simplicity. Not easy to do, but so easy to read.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

I’m a big admirer of Meg Kissinger’s story on mental illness and the law. It’s a complex and controversial topic, one that can provoke a highly charged debate, especially in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech and Tucson, Ariz., shootings.

Meg tackles the subject with authority, sensitivity and balance. She is an ambitious storyteller, using what I call a “braiding” technique – weaving several storylines together, shifting time frames and moving from one perspective to another.

In my view, this braided approach is not entirely successful, so let me dive into the issues of structure and sequence a bit more.

In “Sequencing: Text as Line,” an essay in “Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide,” Tom French urges writers to report and write along a clear, simple line.

“The act of narrative writing is arranging the elements of each sentence, each paragraph, each section, along a line,” French writes. “The skillful writer arranges a line that the reader can follow easily.”

French is not arguing that writers should restrict themselves only to chronological storytelling. But he says that every time a writer diverges from the simple line, there’s the potential for confusing the reader – a new character is introduced, the scene and time frame are different. French asks the writer to think hard before he or she chooses to break the narrative line.

There are often good reasons to break that line, especially in explanatory stories like Meg’s. In “Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies For Every Writer,” Roy Peter Clark explains: “The writer tells us a story, then stops the story to tell us about the story, but then returns to the story… Wonderful insights and explanations are hung like pearls on a strong narrative string.”

I don’t think that Meg could have told her story in one simple line. But I do think the story could have been even more powerful by weaving together only the strongest narrative threads. The other material – the other perspectives and anecdotes – could make strong secondary stories or sidebars.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will outline the sequence of Meg’s story here:

Introducing Martha Wilson (April 2011)
Passage providing context to violence and mental illness, plus details on Virginia Tech and Tucson shootings (April 2007, June 2010)
Psychiatrist Jon Lehrmann speaks about tendency for public to look the other way when confronted with mental illness
Framing question: Why can’t the public and families do more to make sure the mentally ill get the care that they need and help them and others stay safe?
Introducing Alberta Lessard (October 1971)
Martha Wilson looks for help for her son Richard (April 2011)
Sam Hengel’s story – boy who held teacher and students hostage (November 2010)
Alberta Lessard’s court case (Fall 1971)
Lessard’s lawyers’ legal strategy and U.S. Supreme Court ruling (1971-1972)
Background on anosognosia
Aftermath of the Lessard ruling, including Milwaukee County Court Commissioner Rosemary Thornton’s experience
The pace of public mental hospitals emptying out accelerates after the Lessard ruling
Alberta Lessard’s experience after the court ruling
How mental health care is different today, including debate over court-ordered outpatient treatment
The experience of several people who survived the Virginia Tech and Tucson shootings, or whose loved ones were killed in the shootings (2011)
Pat Spoerl’s story – she has struggled for 35 years to keep her son safe (2011)
E. Fuller Torrey’s registry of violent crimes committed against and by people with mental illness
Richard Wilson’s violent act (May 2011)
Alberta Lessard reacts (May 2011)
Lessard’s continuing problems and arrests (Sept. 2011)
Martha and Jeff Wilson attend Richard’s court hearing (June 2011)

The strongest narrative threads are the stories of the Wilson family and of Alberta Lessard. (I include Lessard’s court case and the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling as part of Lessard’s narrative thread.)

Each would be a powerful story in its own right. But the two stories also play well off each other – they show how complicated and painful the issues are. And they get to the heart of the central question: Why can’t the public and families do more to make sure the mentally ill get the care that they need and help them and others stay safe?

I would have advocated braiding these two narrative threads together, and interrupting the story, as sparingly as possible, whenever greater context and explanation is necessary.

While there’s value in the passages on Sam Hengel, Pat Spoerl and Rosemary Thornton, I probably would have moved them into sidebars. This would allow the reader to focus on the Wilson and Lessard stories, and move with more velocity toward Richard Wilson’s violent act.

There’s a strong argument for including the voices of the Virginia Tech and Tucson shooting survivors and families of the victims in the main story. Here’s another approach, though: Write a story based on their experience, and then run it prominently alongside the main story.

Some general takeaways for narrative writers, then (in addition to all the things Kissinger pulls off here): Use clean, simple lines whenever possible. Braid fewer narrative threads, not more. Introduce fewer characters and voices, not more. And stop to provide context and explanation, but only when necessary.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

This story could have been written as a straight chronology, beginning in the past, with a woman who thought Richard Nixon was out to get her.

It could have then moved to the present with the story of two mass murderers and why a young man named Richard Wilson didn’t get the help he needed before he turned into a killer.

But the story was infinitely more effective because Meg Kissinger started in the present, bounced back in time, then toggled back and forth.

Normally, I’m hesitant to jump around that much. As Tom points out, readers can get lost, and the writer can, too. He’s right, also, that the story could have been more tightly focused around the two strongest narratives.

But what I most liked here was that story within the story. It actually kept you focused and eager to read on.

Why didn’t people around Cho or Loughner do more to make sure these obviously ill men got care and that others around them were safe? Why couldn’t Martha and Jeff Wilson force their troubled son to take the medicine that might make him well?

The answer begins 40 years ago on the second-story window sill of Alberta Lessard’s West Allis apartment.

Who could stop there?

Kissinger did several things effectively to weave Lessard’s tale into the larger story.

First, she recognized that Lessard’s case was not only pivotal, but inherently compelling and ironic. Readers would want to follow it through. It was the perfect way to illustrate how difficult it is for even the well-meaning to address the issue of mental illness. Lessard is crazy, sure, and also – at times – perfectly rational.

She took her time. This is a difficult subject, for society to address and a reporter to tackle within the constraints of a newspaper article, even a long piece like this one. So Kissinger told a little at a time, giving you the opportunity to get to know Lessard and become invested in her circumstances.

She made Lessard familiar. So often, particularly with the coverage of mass murders, the deranged killers are little understood. This woman didn’t pick up a gun or a knife, but it wasn’t a stretch to imagine that her paranoia could have fueled something deadly.

She didn’t wait to point out why the old story is so relevant today. Notice that Kissinger doesn’t expect you to read to the end to understand the ramifications of Lessard’s battle. She stops to make sure you take in just how important this case was.

For instance:

Her persistence would change mental health care across America.

And then later:

The standard of imminent danger set by Lessard’s case would prove to be a tragically inaccurate measure for who was mentally ill and in need of being kept safe. … In time, even Lessard would be denied protection she desperately sought. By correcting one outrage, her case had created others.

Again, who could stop there?

————

For more on this story, check back tomorrow for our Q-and-A with Meg Kissinger. For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? Send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

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

Andrea Pitzer — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:26:03 +0000

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.

We’re just a couple of miles in when he zips around a corner and into a narrow alleyway just off Venice Beach. He’s humoring me; I’ve been pestering him about what it was like for him when he first arrived in America, back in 1968, with little money, less English, really nothing but his lats, pecs, traps, and abs, for which there was no obvious market. He stops beside a tall brick wall. It surrounds what might once have been an impressive stone house that now just looks old and bleak and empty. The wall is what interests him, because he built it 43 years ago, right after he had arrived and started to train on Muscle Beach.

Metaphor. Finally, Lewis uses the bike ride to develop a metaphor to describe Arnold’s character: Arnold is improvisational and unpredictable and focused on the future. He rides his bike that way, and he appears to make important decisions that way. In this passage, Lewis makes that metaphorical connection clear.

His life has been a series of carefully staged experiences. He himself has no staged presentation of it, however. He is fresh, alive, and improvisational: I’m not sure even he knows what he will do next… What saves him from self-absorption, aside from a natural curiosity, is a genuine lack of interest in personal reflection. He lives the same way he rides his bike, paying far more attention to what’s ahead than what’s behind.

By taking a bit of a risk – it would be safer to do an office interview, and lots of things could go wrong during a bike ride interview – Lewis develops a narrative that offers us fresh insight into the one and only Arnold.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

This story is like an onion, and it should make you cry.

Michael Lewis starts broadly, with a sad prognosis for the U.S. economy. Then he deftly peels back layers and moves you to the heart of the problem. It goes like this: the nation’s economy is perched on the states’ economies, which are perched on all those cities, which are in a heap of trouble. Yes, with a capital T.

What Lewis does so effectively is take his time. Economics is not easy, and most folks are going to steer clear of a story that tries to dissect the underlying issues. Taking it step by step, Lewis makes it easy to understand and thereby, keep reading.

Along the way, I was struck by a few patterns – Lewis uses simple language to explain complex ideas. He chooses characters battling for the greater good. And he moves readers from one level to another with a familiar rhythm.

On language. Lewis discusses how Meredith Whitney tried to break down the country into zones, to better understand who was in good shape and who was faring poorly. And then he let her colorfully explain why one state wasn’t going to come to another’s rescue – “Indiana is going to be like, ‘N.F.W. I’m bailing out New Jersey.’ ”

Yup, easy to see that.

Lewis discusses Schwarzenegger’s early days in office:

He behaved pretty much as Americans seem to imagine the ideal politician should behave: he made bold decisions without looking at polls; he didn’t sell favors; he treated his opponents fairly; he was quick to acknowledge his mistakes and to learn from them; and so on.

Yup, he failed miserably.

Lewis also discusses – for wonderful context – modern Americans. And here again, simplicity:

“Human beings are wandering around with brains that are fabulously limited,” a neuroscientist says cheerfully. “We’ve got the core of the average lizard.”

Yup, future’s not looking good.

On characters. Lewis introduces folks who have fought – or are fighting – for financial stability. They are people we’ve heard of – Whitney and Schwarzenegger – and those we haven’t – Chuck Reed, Phil Batchelor and Paige Meyer. He gives us only what we need about each to feel a connection.

On Schwarzenegger: “He lives the same way he rides his bike, paying far more attention to what’s ahead than what’s behind.”

On Batchelor and his fellow city employees: “They were survivors of a shipwreck on a life raft with limited provisions.”

On Meyer, the firefighter: “ ‘I needed to learn to control my environment,’ he said. ‘I’d had this false sense of security.’ ”

On handoffs. Check these out:

• “So what’s the scariest state?” I asked her.

She had to think for only about two seconds.

“California.”

•“Which city do you pity most?” I ask just before the elevator doors close.

They laugh and in unison say, “Vallejo!”

•“How do you change the culture of an entire city?” I asked him.

“First of all we look internally,” he said.

It might seem gimmicky to create a pattern like this. I thought it worked well as a way to wrap up one entity and move to the next. It quickly signals, OK, we’re done at this level and we’re going to peel away.

Back to structure. A story like this is effective because the writer is controlling the journey. Think of yourselves as teachers. You have the material and you have to figure out how you’re going to get your students to learn. Not everyone learns the same way, but you can’t go wrong when you’re patient and deliberate.

For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? Send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

October Editors’ Roundtable No. 2: New York magazine updates an archetype

Andrea Pitzer — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:24:10 +0000

Our second October Rountable looks at “A Holly Golightly for the Stripper-Embezzlement Age,” by Jessica Pressler. Pressler introduces readers to former stripper Diane Passage, and a world in which a beautiful woman with enough ambition can get what she wants – at least for a while. The story ran last month in New York magazine and was edited by David Haskell.

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

On lively writing:

Jessica Pressler produces a fun read here, and I’d like to focus on how a lot of what is “fun” is a combination of lively, original language and acute observation. Throughout, she manages to surprise the reader with tart but entirely apt images – funny because they are both irreverent and true.

Consider the first description of the subject, Diane Passage:

When she laughs, her grapefruit-tree physique bounces merrily.

It’s more original and less vulgar than “tits on a stick,” and it goes somewhere, too – between the laughter and the merry bouncing you start to be predisposed to like a not-entirely-sympathetic character.

Passage giggles again, and the ensuing undulations manage to pull Barry’s attention back from the blonde who’d just passed by.

“Ensuing undulations” works so beautifully because it is a comically high description of such a low phenomenon, very Damon Runyon-esque – but also so true: We’ve all seen enough Barrys to know that head-swivel by heart.

Passage is one of those people that it feels like New York invented, though they thrive wherever male egos and dumb money coexist.

Another great observation – a fun clash of stylish language (“though they thrive”) and straight talk (“male egos and dumb money”) that is also poetry. A repeated one-syllable, two-syllable pattern pairing male with dumb and egos with money. A small slice of language perfection.

This next passage is a great use of what is always a smart writing strategy, which is to just give the readers the sensory info they need to draw their OWN conclusions:

His friend, let’s call him Paul, a tall, paunchy private-equity manager was quiet much of the evening but has become considerably more animated after a trip to the bathroom.

Now here comes another smart idea: wringing the meaning out of things others might pass by without comment. In this case, it’s a pretentious name with a transparent marketing strategy. Here’s how Pressler handles that:

Passage moved with her son from a small walk-up to a $7 million condo on the Upper East Side in a building so sure of its fabulousness that it was called “Lux74.”

Extreme compression is yet another artifact of good writing. Here Pressler finds a way to avoid the yadda-yadda of excessive background and tell the whole story in a phrase. The compression of how the character ended up so compromised is so extreme, and so plain spoken, that it becomes delightful, and hilarious:

As a kid, she’d dreamed of becoming a pop star or a veterinarian, but she couldn’t carry a tune and was allergic to hairy animals. By the time she was 18, all she really knew was that she needed to get the hell out of Detroit.

There are lots more like this to choose from, but I’ll end on one that I love because it cuts so directly to the truth of her character, and does so in a way that makes readers look at something familiar in a new way:

“If I was you, I know what I’d do,” said a male colleague one day in 2004, when she confided her problems. He eyed her curvy figure. “I’d go straight to a strip club.”

Some women might have gone straight to human resources. But Passage is a person who considers all offers.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

On summary and momentum:

Let’s start with the obvious – a story about a stripper is going to grab a reader’s attention more than, say, a story about a trash collector. But Jessica Pressler does some wonderful writing here, drawing out a multidimensional character and engaging us with memorable scenes and details.

I particularly loved two graphs in her story, two graphs where she breaks from the action and tightly conveys what you need to know about this woman and the era she’s living in and the place where this story unfolds.

Many writers struggle with this kind of summary. It takes understanding your subject, building connections with the reader, writing in a conversational tone, and most of all, expressing what you know with authority. It also means having the discipline to take pages and pages of notes and provide only what the reader needs to grasp necessary background and to keep him hooked.

Look at what Pressler manages to do in this graph:

Passage is one of those people that it feels like New York invented, though they thrive wherever male egos and dumb money coexist. She’s the kind of woman who is able, through physical charms, nifty tricks of persuasion, and sheer gall, to inspire men to pay for … well, everything. She’s like Holly Golightly, if Holly Golightly had to kick a guy in the nuts when she went to the powder room. Which, in postrecession New York, she might have.

Pressler describes Passage in the present, who she is and who she plays. She gets you to understand that this kind of woman needs a city like New York to really work her magic, because “male egos and dumb money” are more prevalent there than in a place like, say, Norfolk. She compares her to Golighty, Audrey Hepburn’s character from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” one of pop culture’s most famous female hustlers. And she moves Golighty into the modern world, into Passage’s world, with a tease about having to kick a guy in the nuts. In four sentences, you have a pretty good picture of a woman who knows how to work her assets and get what she needs.

And then there’s this graph:

But not so long ago, Passage wouldn’t have entertained the idea of sexually humiliating a man for a mere $100. She wouldn’t have been at this bar, with these guys, taking a small puff of Barry’s spit-covered Habana cigar because he’d thrust it in her face and said “Suck it.” Until quite recently, Passage was the happy protagonist of a modern-day fairy tale: A single mother who, four years ago, was plucked off the dance floor at Scores by a financier who promised to change her life. And change it he did.

Here’s where Pressler invites the reader into Passage’s past. After the earlier graph, you think well, here’s a woman who lives this life because she’s wired this way and it’s better than getting a real job. But then you find out that it’s really about survival and how Cinderella lost her prince (in a not-so-Disney version). And again, there’s a tease, wonderfully appropriate for the subject matter, but also inviting you to find out what happened. How can you not keep reading?

Those teases are particularly important. In any piece of long-form writing, every paragraph needs to build momentum. When you’re in the middle of the dramatic narrative, it’s not hard to keep your readers moving along – there’s action and dialogue and often suspense. But when you step away from those scenes, you can’t bring the story to a complete stop. You still have to keep pace.

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

On how tone reflects character:

The focus of Jessica Pressler’s piece is a not-terribly-admirable character, a woman named Diane Passage who is a gold-digger. The story can make the reader feel uneasy and voyeuristic; it’s borderline tawdry, reflecting a world of hucksterism, populated by people with loose morals and a love of wealth. And it’s written in a breezy, gossipy tone that makes the writer – and the reader – feel like a part of this world. (The second-person “you” in the lede helps draw the reader in, whether he wants to be drawn in or not.)

All of this is, of course, deliberate. That glibness and breeziness camouflage Pressler’s fine reporting and eye for detail, which are the real backbone of the story. And that gum-smacking tone echoes (and thus reinforces) the larger-than-life character of Diane Passage.

Pressler did not write the piece in first person, nor did she write it precisely from Passage’s point of view. Yet the story seems to inhabit Diane, through language and sentence structure.

As a kid, she’d dreamed of becoming a pop star or a veterinarian, but she couldn’t carry a tune and was allergic to hairy animals. By the time she was 18, all she really knew was that she needed to get the hell out of Detroit.

As the story progresses, the reader encounters careless language that is used in a very deliberate way: “Great – not only was she broke, she was being publicly slut-shamed.” Or, “He was a schmoozer.” Pressler walks a fine line here, writing in Diane’s voice but with a broader perspective. That’s what makes this piece so fine – her understanding of Diane’s character, blended with her understanding of Diane’s flaws and limitations. The swagger only goes so far, and underneath you can feel the fear.

“A girl who knows what she’s doing can easily get a free dinner along with her drinks,” shows us Diane’s bravado, but it also shows the sadness of her situation, a life where she is getting by from meal to meal. (Albeit meals at fabulous restaurants.)

This swaggering tone makes Diane seem vulnerable and sad in a way that a story written in a more traditional journalistic tone cannot. There is much in this story that is hinted at, never stated directly.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On when to let your character tell the story:

We’re taught to limit the quotes in our stories. Quotes tend to slow down the storytelling. Readers pause and step outside of the narrative flow as they “listen” to the character talk to them.

So we’re advised to select only the strongest quotes, using only those that advance the plot. We paraphrase the rest.

But Jessica Pressler veers from that guideline in her profile of Diane Passage. She quotes Passage extensively, particularly in the second half of the story. And her approach works well for this story. Here are some takeaways:

Use quotes when the protagonist is a natural-born storyteller. When Passage describes one of her clients’ unusual requests, it’s hard to imagine a narrator conveying the situation’s oddness and vulgarity in the way that Passage can.

We went into this little area and he was like, ‘First, go into the restroom and make me wait,’ ” she says. “So I went into the bathroom for like fifteen minutes and I was texting all my friends and then I came out and I kicked him in the nuts and he was like” – she drops her voice down to a meek whisper – “ ‘Thank you.’ ”

Use quotes when they reveal the protagonist’s motives and thought process. It’s clear throughout the story that Diane Passage is no dummy. She could probably achieve many other things with great success. But through her quotes, we come to see that Passage is not interested in a conventional life. Listen to how she rationalizes the life of the stripper:

During the day, I’d watch these sales people talk and jump through hoops,” she says. “And at night I’d go to work and watch these girls making $400 an hour to get people to go to rooms where nothing happens.” She widens her eyes. “Like, these girls are better than people who went to school and got master’s degrees and bachelor’s degrees.”

Use quotes when they unmask the character’s emotions. Don’t tell the reader that the protagonist is sad and disillusioned. Show it through her behavior and what she talks about. In the following quote, Passage offers Pressler a glimpse into her heart, if only briefly:

And eventually, between the dressing-room talk, the abject behavior of men on the Scores floor, and her own disappointments, Passage started to rethink her approach to dating. “I used to believe in love and romance,” she says. “But I felt like in a lot of cases I was contributing too much to my relationships. It was time,” she says, laughing, “to let someone else contribute.”

Use quotes when your protagonist’s voice exudes personality. You don’t want to overdo it, but you can enrich your story with the cadence of your character’s voice and the colorful words he or she uses. Think of how a radio story comes to life when a person with an unusual voice is interviewed. You can almost hear Passage as she describes, in her own style, the black-tie events she had to attend:

Some of those black-tie events were so fucking boring. We went to one at Blackstone? Their holiday party? I was like, I can’t believe I spent so much time getting ready for this.”

Use quotes when the protagonist is both sympathetic and seriously flawed. Passage is a complicated person (as most of us are), and Pressler does a good job at humanizing her. At the same time, Pressler lets Passage hang herself with quotes that reveal her to be judgmental and hypocritical.

“He always just saw the romance,” she says now, “but that’s not how I saw it. I saw 80-year-old men with 40-year-old wives. I saw a lap dance, a blow job, a Mercedes.”

In general, you’ll want to use only your strongest quotes in storytelling. But when you’re writing about characters with larger-than-life personalities, it will make sense to let them tell a lot of their own stories.

For more on this article, read the Storyboard Q-and-A with Jessica Pressler. For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? If so, you can send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

September Editors’ Roundtable No. 2: The New York Times on facing death

Andrea Pitzer — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 18:59:33 +0000

Our second Roundtable of September examines “The Good Short Life,” by Dudley Clendinen. Diagnosed with ALS, Clendinen reflects on the past suffering of those closest to him and decides that he would prefer to approach death on his own terms, ending his life at a moment of his choosing. His essay ran July 9 in the New York Times.

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

Using juxtaposition to manage tone:

Dudley Clendinen’s essay is about his impending death. Yet the piece is neither depressing nor horrific to read. It is a delight. One of Clendinen’s secrets is the graceful way in which he delivers his message. He is gentle in tone, and he is a master at juxtaposition – pairing something dire with something surprising to temper the grimness and break the tension. Sometimes, even in the midst of such grimness, he makes us laugh.

The lede is a good example.

“We need to go buy you a pistol, don’t we?” he asked quietly. He meant to shoot myself with.

“Yes, Sweet Thing,” I said, with a smile. “We do.”

I loved him for that.

The smile, the “sweet thing,” the love – all are unexpected. They tell us that he’s going to have a very different take on all of this than we expect. And it offers us a little breath of relief.

Or look at this paragraph, in which he does it twice:

At the moment, for 66, I look pretty good. I’ve lost 20 pounds. My face is thinner. I even get some “Hey, there, Big Boy,” looks, which I like. I think of it as my cosmetic phase. But it’s hard to smile, and chew. I’m short of breath. I choke a lot. I sound like a wheezy, lisping drunk. For a recovering alcoholic, it’s really annoying.

He shows you the ravages of his disease – he’s wasting away, losing weight, can barely eat, can barely breathe. And yet two short sentences – “I think of it as my cosmetic phase” and “For a recovering alcoholic, it’s really annoying” – are funny and filled with character. They make it impossible for you to feel sorry for him, though you do feel great empathy.

In the body of the piece, he stays serious. He recounts the early days of his illness – how he coped, or how he watched relatives linger far beyond their time. It’s tough reading, but he has already charmed us, and so we keep going. And then he gives us another little gift, two surprising sentences placed right up against terribly bleak ones. After listing the many ways he could commit suicide (which makes it clear that he has thought this through), he writes of helium that it “would give me a really funny voice at the end.”

And, in the next graf, he assures us: He no longer has to be careful about what he eats or having enough money. And as we realize the enormity of what he is saying, he reassures us: “I am having a wonderful time.”

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

On short sentences:

I first suggested to Andrea that I write about Clendinen’s simple sentences, but as I looked again and again at the material I realized what I meant was short sentences. The power of this piece rests upon the poetry of Clendinen’s sentence-level brevity.

The result easily could have felt choppy or self-indulgent. Some writers prune their sentences in an effort to mimic Hemingway (“For sale: baby shoes, never used.”), with the sole result of showing all the puppet strings. The stripped-down approach often grates – we see the underdeveloped writer, focused more on Self than Story, sweating all over the page in an attempt to impress and manipulate. Which is why it’s so remarkable that every one of Clendinen’s sentences is full of the personal yet devoid of writerly ego. The collective rhythm and unpretentious sentence structures suggest he sees no point in adornment, no time for fat. The subject matter and line-by-line delivery remind me of Beckett (“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”).

In his book on sentence craft, “How to Write A Sentence,” Stanley Fish asks writers (and readers) to first consider form. “The form is more important than the content, and if you master the form and understand what it’s doing and what can be done with it, then you can produce content endlessly,” he recently said on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”

Clendinen’s piece beautifully represents that idea. If you data-crunch this story in terms of sentence structure you find, by my rough count, that 116 of the 124 sentences contain fewer than 20 words. The four-word sentence appears most frequently (18 times), followed by the seven-word sentence (13), the five- or 12-word sentence (nine each), and the eight-word sentence (eight). The longest sentence contains 51 words; the shortest, one (“Why?”).

All 28 of his paragraphs obey the Writing 101 rule to vary one’s sentence lengths whenever possible. In paragraph one: 4 words in the first sentence followed by 9, 8, 10, 4, 12, 21, 7. In paragraph 17: 12, 6, 36. Paragraph 12: 9, 28 (“I began to slur and mumble in May 2010. When the neurologist gave me the diagnosis that November, he shook my hand with a cracked smile and released me to the chill, empty gray parking lot below.”).

Overall, the predominance of short sentences serves the story because:

The good short sentence is a coiled rattlesnake. It does not mess around.

The pacing reflects the subject matter. Together the sentences behave almost like a fusillade, imparting urgency.

The reader doesn’t get lost. Committing to a long sentence can be like entering a maze – we run the risk of forgetting where we are. Unless you’re the next Dickens or Faulkner, step away, por favor, from the steroidal word count.

I wondered whether Clendinen speaks the way he writes, so I listened to some of the wonderful interviews he mentioned, from the “Maryland Morning” program on Baltimore’s main NPR station. Listen to this: “The first thing I notice every morning is the voice,” Clendinen said on March 7, referring to his illness’ effect on his enunciation. “Some mornings it’s better. Some mornings it’s sloppier and slurpier, and I think this morning it’s a little sloppy.” [And that changes day to day?] “It does. Two hours from now it may be better. Tomorrow it may be better. Having a progressive total disease is a little bit like playing chess with a computer: You know the computer’s always thinking, it’s always advancing, it’s gonna make some move – it may be a little one, it may tease you and be good to you one day and then trick you the next, but it’s always moving.”

Clarity and power begin in the mind. Even when Clendinen speaks, one never feels him straining to write (and certainly not to pose) but rather to reveal. The man is dying of ALS and he wants us to know what that’s like. His shrine to this impulse is a simple one but, like a good pine coffin, strong.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On attention to universal theme:

In his essay, Dudley Clendinen goes beyond the traditional nut graf, hitting upon a universal theme.

Facing death can be a freeing experience.

I think it’s important to say that. We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative – not governing – in order to be free.

And that’s the point. This is not about one particular disease or even about Death. It’s about Life, when you know there’s not much left. That is the weird blessing of Lou. There is no escape, and nothing much to do. It’s liberating.

While a traditional nut graf tells the reader what the news in the story is, the universal theme graf (or grafs) tells the reader the broader meaning of the story – or at least hints at it. The graf gives the reader what I call a glimpse of wisdom.

You’re not necessarily going to need a universal theme graf for a straightforward news story; the report’s main purpose is to convey information. But a universal theme graf can strengthen the setup of a narrative, essay or feature story – it signals that your piece is going to be about a larger idea, one that will hopefully resonate with readers.

Chip Scanlan, a longtime mentor of mine, provided a road map for crafting a theme graf in his classic 2003 Poynter column, “Selling the Power of Focus.”

Inspired by journalist David Von Drehle, Chip described a set of five questions that can help writers determine the focus – and theme – of their stories: Why does the story matter? What’s the point? Why is the story being told? What does the story say about life, the world and the times we live in? What’s the story really about – in one word?

Chip argued that readers, overwhelmed by information, are hungry for meaning.

He quoted Jack Fuller, the former Chicago Tribune editor and publisher who wrote in News Values: “People come to a newspaper craving a unifying human presence – the narrator in a piece of fiction, the guide who knows the way, or the colleague whose view one values. Readers don’t just want random snatches of information flying at them from out of the ether. They want information that hangs together, makes sense, has some degree of order to it. They want knowledge rather than facts, perhaps even a little wisdom.”

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

On the power of the personal essay:

Many reporters would rather eat nails than write about themselves. It’s ironic, really, because we’re happy to intrude on other people’s lives and ask personal questions and hope for dramatic insight. But exposing yourself – figuratively – can be terrifying.

In this case, Dudley Clendinen is up against something even more frightening – ALS – so maybe it’s not so hard to open up. I’d argue that more writers should give it a try. Readers need to be reminded that we are, despite what they may think, human.

Of course, a gifted storyteller can relate any experience better than most. But consider the biggest advantage of the personal essay – you’ve already done a lot of the reporting. After all, it’s your life, your experiences, your take.

In this case, Clendinen got to choose from everything – his past, what he’s facing now, what he’s been thinking about, what people have done for him, what he’s done for others, conversations he’s had, how he looks, what he’s learned about the disease, what choices he’s made, what regrets he has, what he’s happy about. You’d be lucky to have that much material on any story.

Then you have to have the courage to share. Remember, we ask people to do this all the time. To lay bare their worst moments. We try to pull out of them what it’s like to learn that you’re going to die. How do you make peace with that? What are you scared of?

Do we get honest and/or complete answers? I suspect that it rarely happens, because most folks will only go so far with total strangers.

But Clendinen took us right up to the crossroad we’re all going to reach someday. He wrote with personality and humor, so it wasn’t a downer, despite the topic. And writing about himself allowed Clendinen to make a convincing argument for why we should think more about death than we do. Because it was his story, the message also carried more weight: “Lingering would be a colossal waste of love and money.”

For more on Dudley Clendinen, read the Storyboard Q-and-A with him. For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? If so, you can send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

Corinne Reilly on trauma medicine in Afghanistan, after a decade of war

Andrea Pitzer — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:03:23 +0000

Our latest Editors’ Roundtable looks at Corinne Reilly’s print series “A Chance in Hell.” Part of a multimedia project from The Virginian-Pilot, the series brings readers snapshots from the lives of combat hospital staff in Kandahar. Reilly covers the military for the Pilot and joined the paper in 2009 after four years working at the Merced (Calif.) Sun-Star. She has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan and Haiti. In these excerpts from our conversation, she discusses finding a different story than the one she had planned to tell, putting the reader in her shoes, and fighting war fatigue at home.

You had to go halfway around the world to report “A Chance in Hell.” What conversations did you have with your editors about the story before you left the U.S.?

I went to Iraq last summer with the photographer who went with me on this trip, Ross Taylor. That was his first experience embedded with the military, and as soon as he got back, he wanted to do it again.

I started broadly looking at what local units would be in Afghanistan at the time that we were talking about making the trip. A combat hospital was not even on our radar at first, but then we thought that something related to Navy medicine could be compelling. We’re a Navy town, and Navy medicine is kind of a big thing. They provide all the medical service for the entire Marine Corps.

I called over to the local Navy hospital that’s here, and that’s how we found out about the hospital. As soon as we started talking to people who had served there, we all knew that this was the story we wanted to go there for.

We had some meetings with my direct editor, and also her direct boss, and then also Maria [Carrillo]*, our managing editor, and our top editor Denis Finley, and came up with a plan for a topical series. I knew they treated members of the Taliban, or suspected members of the Taliban and enemy combatants. I thought that was really compelling and could be a story. I thought maybe there was also something general on combat medicine and the way it’s changed over the last 10 years of war.

But as soon as we got there and realized the power of the place and the access we would have, I immediately knew that our plan wouldn’t do justice to what was in front of us. So maybe the second day I realized I needed an entirely new plan.

So you knew you had to change the way you were approaching the project. How did you make that shift?

What really triggered it was the access we were given. Obviously, it’s a medical setting, so there are all kinds of privacy considerations to take into account. We just weren’t really sure what it would be, but it ended up being much wider access than Ross or I ever imagined.

That first and second day, I would meet patients or talk to patients, and it was not fitting into the plan that I came with. But it was so incredibly powerful, and I just thought, “The best way to tell this story is maybe just to tell it all, and it doesn’t have to be this neat topical series.” The way I think of the story is almost as one long narrative.

It took me a couple days of mulling it over in my head before it gelled that it could be a series of scenes, meeting a series of different people, with bigger-picture stuff thrown in at the right points to guide the reader. I’d exchanged emails with my editor, and we had one phone conversation where we decided that was the path we were going to take.

How long were you there?

We were at the hospital for two weeks – 14 days.

How do you report for narrative in that situation? What did you make sure to get while you were right there?

A lot of the particulars I kind of knocked out in the first couple days – things like how many people worked there, the lay of the land, what are the different departments, what are the different jobs. Once I had that, felt like I understood this place from that perspective. Then I literally wrote down everything. Anytime a patient came in that I thought could be a compelling part of the story, I tried to see that patient all the way through until they left the hospital.

I usually got to the hospital around 8 or 9 in the morning and then stayed until 8 or 9 at night, and then I would go back, and before bed, I would take a few hours to organize my notes. By maybe the fifth or sixth day, I had an idea of who I had met so far, and I had identified a few people I thought could be key characters. And then subsequent days, I would go back and spend more time with those doctors to fill in their stories.

You got a lot of sensory detail in there.

I feel like this story was very unique in that so many of the details in and of themselves were striking. Whatever struck me, I wrote down. There were definitely times I went back and used Ross’ photos, and he also took a lot of video, so I could use it to fill in. For instance I had a detail of a physician’s assistant wiping blood off of a patient’s face, and I couldn’t remember the color of the cloth she was using, but I wanted that in the story, so I went back and looked at photos for things like that.

But certainly things like smells I was trying to write down – even thoughts that were going through my mind. There’s a section where I kind of expand on “who is this person on the table?” You’re noticing details about him, and you’re wondering who he is. Those were my own thoughts in the moment.

It’s interesting that you brought that up, because it’s an unusual mid-story shift to the second person. Had you also seen the wounded soldier in the gym, as is mentioned in the story, or was that a shift to the doctor’s perspective?

I had not seen him in the gym. I guess that “you” was a hybrid of my thoughts and even conversations I had with Ross when we were standing there while they were prepping the guy for surgery – we almost had that conversation: “I wonder who that guy is. I wonder how long he’s staying here. I wonder when he’s going to get to go home.”

And then part of it was also conversations with doctors afterward. A lot of them said things like, “We keep these patients for 36 hours, and then we never see them again. We never get to know who they are or see them again after.” Once in a while they do, but so many patients come through that they don’t get to follow up with once they leave the hospital.

Certainly when that physician’s assistant said that she’d seen him at the gym, I thought that was incredibly striking.

When you got back, you had all this stuff. At that point, did you already have the story segregated into pieces in your mind? How did you approach dividing the material into separate stories?

I definitely wrote large pieces of it while I was there. I would come back after a day at the hospital to the place where we slept. A first I started out organizing my notes and my thoughts. I would say by the fifth or sixth day I had a plan for what I wanted the story to look like, and I actually started writing scenes. So if I witnessed something that day that I knew would be a significant scene in the story, I would write a first draft of it that night before going to bed. I felt like that was really essential to showing what it really felt like to be there.

So in terms of breaking it into a five-part series, that didn’t happen until much later. I just sent everything I had written to my editor, Meredith Kruse, and we talked about an order and piecing them together, and how many parts do we need – we figured that out together. We literally laid the pieces out and kind of outlined it. And then she said, “This is what I still think is still needed here.” And I went back and wrote the entire second section of the first chapter, the one that pulls back and says “This is where we are.” Those were the parts where I didn’t feel like I would lose details if I waited until I got back to write.

You’re playing an educational role in getting a lot of information across to your readers. How did you think about balancing facts with the more scene-based parts of the story?

I wasn’t terribly deliberate, but I definitely didn’t want the bits with the facts – things I might consider drier pieces of information – to weigh down everything else, to weigh down the people, and the emotion and the real meaning of the place. I tried to convey as much as I could about the place through the people who were there and their stories, so you don’t even have to come back and say, “We are at a combat hospital. We are in Afghanistan. We are in Kandahar.” By the time you get through that first scene with Cpl. Ward, you already kind of understand what this place is. I wanted to make it so that you need as little additional information as possible.

You tucked in a few graphic details, but not a lot. How did you approach pacing the use of sensory detail and the most graphic material?

I think through all of it, with the writing and the whole package, we were really worried. It’s a very fine line. You want people to see it the way it really is, but you also don’t want people to turn away and stop reading. I tried to include details that might be graphic if I thought they served a purpose other than simply being graphic.

Did you start with more of those details in and then took some out, or did you go back and add things in?

There were a few cases where I did take things out, because I thought they were too graphic, so I would say it was a little of both. When I was actually in Afghanistan, I did err on the side of putting more in, because not everything makes it into your notebook and it’s only going to last in your memory so long. So I thought I should do it while it’s fresh in my mind, and if it comes out later, fine.

We’ve been at war a long time. People have seen a lot of war scenes, and they’re also pretty conversant with medical stories. What were your strategies for making sure they paid attention?

I did think from the very beginning that was going to be one of the key challenges with this story. We’ve been at war for 10 years; people know that. One of the biggest challenges of this story was getting people’s attention and finding a way to say “this is why this matters now,” even though this story could have been written five years ago.

The second little part of the first chapter where I quote one of the main characters in the story, Ron Bolen, saying, “You know, I know this is old news and that what we’re talking about now is winding down.” The reason I chose to put that there so high in the story was because I thought, “Let’s just address that. Let’s get it out there.” Yes, this has been happening a long time, but I thought I could almost flip it and say maybe that makes it more important now. It’s kind of saying, “We acknowledge that, but look, they’re still here; they’re still showing up every day.”

*Maria Carrillo is a member of our Editors’ Roundtable but did not select this story for discussion and was not involved in any aspect of our coverage of it.

August Editors’ Roundtable No. 1: GQ ponders truth, lies and mystery

Andrea Pitzer — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:38:52 +0000

Our first Roundtable of August considers “Blindsided: The Jerry Joseph Basketball Scandal,” by Michael Mooney. The story spotlights a high school basketball player who stirred up questions about truth and identity that the town of Odessa, Texas, is still struggling to answer. “Blindsided” ran in the July issue of GQ and was edited by Michael Benoist.

For full bios of the Roundtable editors, see our introductory post.

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

On the importance of the setup and kicker:

This story reminded me of the French film “The Return of Martin Guerre,” in which a character who appears out of nowhere might or might not be who he says he is. Like the movie, the lede of “Blindsided” both makes you care about Jerry Joseph – an overgrown child of misfortune longing for a home and a family – and plants seeds of doubt about him. The supposed facts of his life are carefully attributed: “He said he didn’t really know what day he was born. His parents were both dead before he turned 5, he said. . . . Jerry Joseph’s birth certificate read January 1.” The attributions indicate that we don’t know these things to be true. Jerry’s life, another character guesses, might be a dream.

Even Jerry’s feelings at his birthday party are either reported or imagined by others. This deftly tells us that this story will be substantially about the way people reacted to Jerry and that we may never hear the truth from him. We will learn it, though: A line about Jerry’s foster father, Danny Wright, hints that the mystery has been solved (“It’s a moment Wright keeps coming back to”). It’s logical to imagine right away that Jerry Joseph will turn out to be a fraud (especially if you’ve been reminded of “The Return of Martin Guerre”), but as a reader you’re in the same position as the people around Jerry, and you won’t know for sure until they do. You have to read on.

Even after the mystery is solved, the story’s final section keeps it alive. We know Jerry Joseph’s real name is Guerdwich Montimere, but we really don’t know who he is. We only know who he wants to be, perhaps even believes he is. The author repeats the theme of the story, which he stated once before, well into the narrative: “Every man dreams about it. … How much fun it’d be to replay the game of life if given a second chance.” We finally meet Guerdwich, and he says his name is Jerry.

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

On suspense:

This is worth repeating: We’re often too quick to refer to any long feature story as a narrative. Just because a piece is long doesn’t make it a narrative, and just because a piece is short doesn’t not make it a narrative. One of my favorite narratives is an 835-word story by the wonderful Larry Bingham, about a Texas man who, at age 98, learned how to read.

A narrative contains arc, character development (doable even in a straightjacket, as Bingham proves), nuance and, to some degree, suspense. By suspense I don’t mean sounding the Here’s Some Drama! gong via strained writing and an authorial desire to make structure do the hard work of reporting/writing; I mean perfuming the air with an intriguing question or two. A mystery on any scale keeps us turning pages.

Mooney’s piece lent itself to a slow tell because the story itself is a mystery – that always helps – but he easily could’ve ruined the thing by overwriting, which tends to happen when you’ve underreported or when you’re stumped by the mechanics of a story that’s missing some of its natural parts. The development of suspense started not with the writing but rather with the reporting. In keeping key questions in mind as the investigator/writer, he nurtured them on the page: Is Jerry a fraud? Who the hell is Jerry? If he isn’t who he says he is, why all the fakery? How will Coach Wright, and Odessa, handle the revelation?

Those answers are the destination; Mooney seeds the story with foreshadowing details that move us there. Details about trust. Details about warning pings that sounded when Jerry first took off his shirt. Think of these as Chekhov’s firecrackers.

Also, as crucial as it is to work toward a killer kicker, it’s just as important in a story of this length to hone section kickers. Individually, Mooney’s section kickers keep you reading; collectively they’re the dovetail joints holding the whole cabinet together.

Examples:

“Who were we to question his story,” Anders says. “He was the first Haitian most of us had ever met.”

Just when you knew where Jerry was going, he went in a completely new direction.

He needed to know one thing: Was there a girl?

“Where’s Jerry, Daddy? Where’s Jerry?”

His ultimate kicker is powerful in its simplicity and also in its complex message about human identity. Plus, it leaves us in a moment of currency and forward spin.

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

On the art of withholding and revealing:

A lot of writing involves deciding how to release information, what to reveal now, and what to conceal for later. The idea is both to make a complex set of facts painless for the reader to absorb by managing the download of information, and (as Paige notes) to create suspense. Michael Mooney proves to be a master of both in this piece, a mastery he demonstrates before you even get beyond the lede. In the very first paragraph, he jumps right in to the literal middle of the story, but by careful selection of what facts he presents, he manages to make a complicated story comprehensible.

He economically conveys, in this order; 1) the mystery, 2) the unusual circumstances, and 3) the foreshadowing that something is wrong with this picture.

The mystery is conveyed directly, but with sparse information: “He said he didn’t really know what day he was born. His parents were both dead before he turned 5, he said, and he’d never celebrated a birthday in his life.”

The unusual circumstances: “But Jerry Joseph’s birth certificate read January 1, so on New Year’s Day 2010, his family gathered around him. It would be a new year, a new decade, a celebration of Jerry’s brand-new life.”

The incongruity is the cherry on top: “There were flimsy cardboard hats and streamers and wrapped gifts. Jerry, who at six feet five and 220 pounds was several inches taller than anyone else in his adoptive family, was presented a white cake adorned with candles in the shape of a 1 and a 6.”

Note how he chooses to never actually say the age “16.” Allowing the reader to pick this up only by indirection ironically manages to magnify its significance. Without ever saying it directly, he’s assured that every reader will emerge from the lede knowing that the mystery of Jerry’s origins and his age will be the most discordant issues in what otherwise might just be a feel-good story about a privileged family adopting an underprivileged boy.

Two paragraphs in, readers are already far more involved and curious than if the writer had simply explained what the story would be about in a traditional nut graf. He has delivered a keen intuitive sense of what will make this story worth reading, and a sense of delight in anticipation of a story told in a dramatic, rather than pedantic way.

He keeps his narration steadfastly nonjudgmental by taking Jerry’s increasingly implausible claim that he is not a fraud at face value – a stance that pays wonderful dividends at the end, when we discover that Jerry’s insistence that “I am not that person” has taken on more than a literal meaning, that Jerry’s lie has become, on some level his truth.

The overall principle here is one of respect for the readers, and an understanding that the more you enable readers to divine for themselves, using expertly arranged clues, the more they will get out of the reading experience. Of course, this is a risky strategy, because it requires unerring judgment to prevent the sense of enlightenment a reader experiences from degrading into mere confusion. Mooney’s sure hand here removes any threat that will happen.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

On developing character without the character’s help:

The question that drives this story, of course, is “Who is this guy?” and not “Is he Jerry Joseph or Guerdwich Montimere?” Who was it that the people in Odessa met and became attached to – a decent person or a fraud? Or possibly both?

The writer here has to reveal character, and has to do it without the character’s help.

That’s a dilemma we find ourselves in from time to time. Sometimes, a person is reluctant to share his story. Or he clearly wants to embellish his tale, to make himself come across in a stronger light. Occasionally, we’re writing about someone who has disappeared or passed away.

It’s not impossible to succeed in those circumstances, but it is challenging.

A reporter is forced to ask people who crossed paths with the character to help provide the telling details.

Michael Mooney does a lot of work here. He shows us what they saw:

Danny Wright … noticed the kid get misty-eyed, just as he had at his first Christmas a week earlier.

Lots of people saw him out there in the hot August sun. Three miles each way, jogging through the streets like he was Rocky or something.

He skipped down the halls when he thought nobody was watching.

He tells us what Joseph told townspeople:

He said he didn’t really know what day he was born.

He’d been homeless in Haiti, he said.

He said that most of his life was spent herding goats.

He gives us physical description, mannerisms:

The kid had all sorts of tattoos, inflated pecs, and shoulders like a racehorse.

Jerry had a beautiful wide smile and what nearly everyone describes as an exotic “swagger.”

Fans remarked that with his flat-top haircut and the way he always seemed drenched in sweat, Jerry looked a little like Boobie Miles, the star-crossed running back from the Friday Night Lights season.

He shares what people were thinking about this guy:

A few of the teachers joked that Jerry was secretly an adult.

Anders wondered if maybe the kid wasn’t some kind of prodigy.

“He knew the game like a coach.”

And the nicknames they gave him:

They called him Grandpa and the Haitian Sensation.

He describes Joseph’s actions:

Jerry was popular with the teenage girls, a good employee – never late, never snapped at anyone, never had any money missing from his register.

Just seconds into the first quarter, he snatched the ball and drove the length of the court, throwing down what several teammates describe as a “gorilla slam.”

If he thought he’d miss church, he made sure to e-mail Pastor Skelton saying he’d be thinking of them.

Imagine the litany of questions Mooney had to ask – what did Joseph do and say? What did you notice about him? What were you thinking each time you were with him? What were your conversations like? How did you react to him? Why didn’t anyone challenge his account of his past?

All those answers built this story.

At the end, readers are left much like the townspeople, holding out hope that it wasn’t a total betrayal. But if it was, at least we can understand how a stranger managed to win this town over.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On finding the emotional core of the story:

(Full disclosure: I was Mike Mooney’s editor when he was an intern at The Dallas Morning News in 2007.)

While the character of Jerry Joseph stands at the center of “Blindsided” – he is the reason for the story, after all – Mike Mooney develops the emotional heart of his story through another central character: Danny Wright.

As Maria Carrillo notes, Mooney paints the portrait of Joseph through the perspectives of people whose lives he touched. Still, Joseph remains an enigma. Is he the ultimate con man, or is he psychologically damaged, or is he both? We may never know, and that’s where Danny Wright comes in.

Most stories need a central character that readers can identify with, and it helps if the character faces a dilemma.

Wright is a good man. He’s the 50-year-old basketball coach who used to direct the local Boys & Girls Club. He’s known as “Dad” or “Pops” around town, and he and his wife have taken in as many as 18 kids over the years. “The oldest of five in a single-mother household, Wright has been taking care of kids his whole life,” Mike writes. “It’s why God put him on this earth.”

Wright always sees the good in people. The dilemma he faces is that, while he can see a lot of good in Jerry, he can’t decipher what’s truth and what’s fiction in Jerry’s story. His faith in people is shaken.

Mooney’s storytelling benefits from Wright’s ability to observe what’s around him and reflect upon it. For example, the first scene – of the birthday party – is based largely on Wright’s memory. And the question Wright asks in hindsight launches the story. “It’s a moment Wright keeps coming back to, when Jerry closed his bright brown eyes. What could the boy have wished for? he wonders.”

Like Wright, we are driven to ask this question throughout the story as we learn more about Jerry’s fabrications. When Wright finally learns the truth about Jerry Joseph, we feel his heart breaking – our hearts break, too – even as his anger rises.

“This is you,” Coach Wright said, barely able to contain his anger.

“That ain’t me,” Jerry said.

“Look,” Wright said, leaning in, “I’m not asking for confirmation. I’m telling you. I don’t know what you’re pulling, but you need to get your things and be on your way.”

By the end of the story, Wright’s family is torn – his wife and kids still love Joseph, but the coach has his doubts. And he’s no longer sure whether he can still help needy kids.

Mooney’s story, then, is not only about the mystery of Jerry Joseph. It also follows the emotional journey of Danny Wright, from faith through betrayal to doubt.

For more, read our interview with Michael Mooney about his story, or take a look at our previous Editors’ Roundtables.

Is there a story you’d like the Roundtable to tackle? If so, you can send a link to us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org.

July Editors’ Roundtable No. 1: the St. Petersburg Times’ snapshot between before and after

Andrea Pitzer — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 17:07:21 +0000

For the first Roundtable of July, our editors looked at “Diving headlong into a sunny paradise” by Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times. The story follows a young Wisconsin couple on their first day starting a new life in Florida. Appearing in print on Memorial Day, DeGregory’s piece was edited by Mike Wilson, the St. Petersburg Times’ managing editor for enterprise.

Our editors didn’t see each other’s comments as they wrote and haven’t yet read our interview with DeGregory about her story.

For bios of the Roundtable editors, see our January post.

Kelley Benham
Enterprise editor, St. Petersburg Times

On reporting that nails the story:

[Full disclosure: I work with Lane, and while I’m not her editor, I have edited some of her stories in the past. I was on leave from the paper when she wrote this piece, so I wasn’t involved with it.]

When I was a new reporter, my editor had the good sense to give me the desk next to Lane DeGregory. He knew I’d learn just by eavesdropping over the half-wall of the cubicle.

The first thing I noticed was that I spent a lot more time at my desk than she did. She was always out chatting up convenience store clerks and truckers and God-knew-who. She couldn’t walk three blocks without making a new friend and arranging to follow them home. So when I saw this story in the newspaper, I could picture clearly how it came together.

Lane was on the bus. Of course she was. She goes where the story is and soaks it in. Lane’s stories always seem to unfold in places suggesting stale odors and crumpled lottery tickets. Lane doesn’t think she’s better than anybody. She genuinely loves people, and especially people who could use a break. That open spirit leads her to stories others overlook. Lane’s people are barflies, carnies, lost souls and anyone who gets nervous walking into a bank office. Her people ride the bus.

She recognized the story in front of her. If I’d been on that bus and noticed the pale people smooching, I would have smiled and tried not to stare. Not Lane. She got their story – they were escaping the frozen north and seeing Florida for the first time – and recognized what it represented. She was witnessing the mythic tug of the Florida dream, of eternal sunshine and oranges you can eat right off the trees. Forcing yourself to identify the larger idea in your narrative early on provides a clear mission for the reporting and writing.

She followed the story where it led. Lane and photojournalist John Pendygraft tagged along as the couple searched for the beach. They were willing to have their day hijacked by the unexpected story. They made room for serendipity. They recognized that their narrative was a quest, and to tell it they would need to report for action and allow it to unfold. Being there allowed Lane to capture moments like:

“What’s a pelican?”

“You know, like on Finding Nemo.”

She filled her notebook with detail and dialog. I like to deconstruct stories like this, to try to figure out what questions the reporter asked, and what she might have written in her notebook. She wasn’t with the couple as they packed and pulled away from Wisconsin, but her smart questions allowed her to maintain the narrative and her characters’ perspective as she weaves the backstory. Some questions Lane probably asked: What did the postcard look like? (A pelican on a piling …) Do you have it? Can I see it? What’s in your pocket? ($141, a half-pack of Marlboro reds) Can I look in your bag? (Jenna slipped a photo of her mom into a sock.)

Back at the office, she nailed down the rest of the story. Lane backgrounded her characters and discovered Dan was on probation. She had to decide whether that changed the nature of the story, and find a way to work it in without disrupting the narrative. (Jenna knows all about Dan’s past …) She researched the town they escaped. (Nine square miles of prairie, with 9,728 people and a prison.) She found the temperature in Wisconsin when they climbed on the bus. (39 degrees.) And every piece of background that she worked into the story helps explain how Dan and Jenna ended up in St. Petersburg.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary:

[Full disclosure: I worked with Lane at The Virginian-Pilot in the early ’90s.]

Lane DeGregory notices characters and events that most other journalists pass by. She pays attention and lets curiosity guide her. She often recognizes a profound story lying just under the surface.

In following Dan and Jenna, Lane explores what draws some people to St. Petersburg. Sometimes, those reasons are random, romantic and irrational.

There’s no overarching trend in this story. No hard news nugget. No statistics graf. Instead, Lane steps out of the action and uses her narrator’s voice to underscore the universality of Dan and Jenna’s story. This is crucial: Lane helps the reader identify with the couple.

She does so by touching on the broader theme of escape:

Millions of people have done this, decided all their troubles would disappear, all their dreams would come true, if they moved to the land of eternal sunlight.

Dan and Jenna set out for the same reasons folks have flocked to Florida for more than a century: To stop shoveling snow. To escape. To start over.

They weren’t worried about unemployment rates or hurricanes or oil spills. They were young and in love and they had each other. All they needed were a few waves. And a tan.

If you remember what it was like to be young and in love and wanting to escape, then you understand Dan and Jenna’s story.

Lane also reminds us about how, after we’ve lived in a certain place for a long time, we no longer notice the extraordinary things around us. She gently tells her St. Petersburg readers to open their eyes: “After we have been here for a while, it’s easy to forget what a weird, wonderful place we live in, where blue herons wander through gas stations and bushes bloom all year.

We crank up the AC, close our blinds and watch TV. Instead of venturing into the Eden outside.

In the final scene, Lane uses Dan and Jenna’s kiss in the Gulf waters to return to the theme of escape and starting over – water is a symbol for birth and rebirth: “All their lives they had been surrounded by land, the whole country hemming them in. Now, they were at the edge of everything, about to dive in.”

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

Gaining the trust of your subjects:

[Full disclosure: Lane was one of my writers here at The Pilot before she joined The Times, and she remains a close friend.]

Lane DeGregory is an editor’s dream for many reasons, but one in particular is how she manages to get people to share details that they wouldn’t tell their best friends. All narrative writers should strive for that intimacy.

People expect reporters to ask them basic questions, the who, the what, the when. With stories like this one, the reporting is much more involved. Notice that Lane pulled from this couple the details of their trip, what they took, how they left, what they were thinking. She found out what inspired them to go south, what they were hoping for, what they did once they arrived. She drew out emotions and reactions and gestures.

This is a story about a journey, and Lane wasn’t sitting next to them on that bus from Wisconsin, but she needed us to feel like she was. The only way to accomplish that was to get this couple to open up about everything, including their baggage – emotional and otherwise.

I haven’t talked to Lane about this story, so I don’t know exactly what she did to deserve their trust. But I know Lane, and I bet she did a few of the things she always does.

She was drawn to these guys. Lane has no interest in celebrities or politicians. She enjoys reaching out to people on the margins – even oddballs – to those other reporters ignore.

She asked them to share their story. I’m sure Lane treated them with dignity and made them feel important, like their experience was worthy of a headline.

She listened carefully and patiently. Anyone who wants to reach deep into someone else’s experience needs to not only draw out the details with good questions but also be quiet.

She was genuinely curious and compassionate. Lane always is. It’s second nature. She would have made a great bartender, too.

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

Gaining the trust of the reader:

This is an unusual newspaper story – no nut graf, no news peg, no experts. What is it? (I can imagine many editors asking.) It is a brilliant moment in time, skillfully sandwiched between bad moments of the past and bad moments almost certainly yet to come. It is reminiscent in many ways of Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” How did Lane DeGregory do this? How did she pack so much pathos, hope and dread into one short piece? How did she make us believe it?

Sneaky attribution. Readers need grounding. We want to understand how the writer knows what she tells us. DeGregory tells us so sneakily we don’t even notice. Right up top, in the first graf: “He remembers every detail.” And, later, “Jenna knows all about Dan’s past.” The attribution is there throughout, just camouflaged.

Just enough context. There’s no nut graf in this story, but it is studded with context and meaning. Every so often DeGregory falls back from the action and reminds us that this story is not just about Dan and Jenna, but about all of us – about America, that great theme of striking out on one’s own and starting over. But each time she does this, she does it swiftly, and then immediately brings us back to our main characters.

Examples:

Millions of people have done this, decided all their troubles would disappear, all their dreams would come true, if they moved to the land of eternal sunlight. Dan and Jenna set out for the same reasons folks have flocked to Florida for more than a century…

and

After we have been here for a while, it’s easy to forget what a weird, wonderful place we live in, where blue herons wander through gas stations and bushes bloom all year. … This young couple had journeyed more than 1,350 miles to find Florida. Now that they were here, things seemed so surreal.

and

All their lives they had been surrounded by land, the whole country hemming them in. Now, they were at the edge of everything, about to dive in.

No trauma, no extremes, no tragedy. Newspapers dwell in the world of extremes: The brave cancer patient, stoic to the end. The brutal murderer who kills someone in cold blood. This story resonates because these kids are so ordinary. It’s easy to believe the story, because it’s so easy to identify with it. We’ve either done something like this ourselves, or know someone who has.

Details provide credibility. The more you learn about Dan and Jenna, the more you can picture them. The more you see them, the more you believe them. And so the details – Jenna blinking in the too-bright sun; her Hannah Montana purse; her vari-colored fingernails; her hoodie sweatshirt; the way she hid a photograph of her mother in a sock. Dan’s haircut; his inky tattoos; his crooked smile. I wrote that list without referring back to the story because DeGregory had made these people so real I couldn’t forget them.

For more, read our interview with Lane DeGregory, in which she discusses how she found Dan and Jenna and the hard-luck epilogue to the story.

June Editors’ Roundtable: The Washington Post finds order in chaos

Andrea Pitzer — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 19:47:42 +0000

For the first Roundtable of the month, our editors looked at “Ala. tornado twists two families together” by Stephanie McCrummen from The Washington Post. The story, published early in May, covers an unusual connection between strangers after a twister roared through Rainsville, Ala.

We’ve switched things up a little this installment, freeing editors from a pesky word count and asking them to pick out one device or idea that they wanted to focus on rather than looking at the whole story. They didn’t see each other’s comments as they wrote, and haven’t yet read the reporter’s reflections on how the piece came together. Tomorrow we’ll post our interview with McCrummen [update: the interview is now up], but here we offer our editors’ thoughts. (For bios on the members of the Roundtable, see our January post.)

Kelley Benham
Enterprise editor, St. Petersburg Times

On writing about emotion:

Ah, here in the bag of downers that marks the recent tornado coverage, we find this heartwarming, uplifting story to renew our faith in humanity.

And here are some words that never appear in the story: Heartwarming. Uplifting. Faith in humanity.

This is the kind of story that makes your heart swell, makes you dash off a check to the Red Cross and hide your sniffles. But emotion is difficult to conjure. You can’t force it, bludgeon it, demand it. All you can do it put the right elements in the right order, then hope the reader feels something.

Here, the writer builds emotion without stumbling into sentimentality by assembling a clean, focused narrative driven by action, in which every line is rooted in reported detail.

She uses action to establish the focus swiftly and cleanly. We are with Corey Plunkett and his wife surveying the devastation when we get the first key observation: “Everything was someone else’s.” Sense of place is established through action as well, by following the flight of paper on the wind.

When the emotion in the story is turned up, the writing is turned down. Corey Plunkett’s crying in the fifth paragraph is tucked into the middle of a sentence, in the position of least importance. Imagine by comparison bad television coverage we’ve all seen before, where the camera zooms in and lingers on the tears, like some kind of prize. Or the (sub)standard newspaper feature story, where tears glitter on cheeks, often like diamonds.

The language throughout is simple and specific. There are no fancy words, few adverbs, no clichés. Sentences mostly branch to the right. It can be tempting to pump in extra syllables, as if doing so would signal the reader that “This Is Important.” Better to pull back. My editor, Mike Wilson, says, “Two cheers for understatement.”

My favorite line, for its simplicity and restraint: “He put it on the shelf next to his antidepressants. He waited.”

Characters are established through detail, not generalizations. You can’t care about someone unless you know them, and the writer makes the introductions but allows the reader to own the conclusions. We see the wood paneling, the blanket covering the rips in the couch. We learn everyone’s income, without being told that anyone is poor. No one is labeled selfless or a hero.

The writer patiently allows the story to unfold. We learn about the characters as they learn about each other. We see the Alabama couple “conjuring” the couple in Tennessee. We learn only very late in the story that Charlie Thompson’s wife is in a wheelchair after a stroke, that his daughter has Down syndrome. Like the tears in the top of the story, these details are placed quietly in the paragraphs.

The quotes are as disciplined as the rest of the piece. The writer does not allow vague, lazy thought into the story just because it’s inside a quote mark. Best quote in the story: “Oh, Corey.”

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

On the pacing of details:

I was moved by this piece and especially impressed by the way the author advanced the story through the careful distribution of small, telling details. We learn things about the Plunketts and the Thompsons gradually, and it’s much more effective than being told all at once.

Little by little the details, reported matter-of-factly, often introduced indirectly – Corey is bearded and 25; he has a factory job; he’s frustrated because he can’t brush his teeth; he writes poems and regrets in a spiral notebook; he makes $360 gross a week – add up to a vivid portrait.

The same happens with Charlie and Melissa and Heather Thompson. A shelf on Charlie’s desk contains his antidepressants; the daughter sitting on the green couch has Down syndrome. Rather than be told at the start that Charlie struggles with depression and Melissa is physically disabled and Heather mentally disabled, we’re led to these facts by the wheelchair and the shelf and the couch, and the facts have no less impact for having been backed into.

The author trusts the reader, and the reader is rewarded with images that linger because they were allowed to do their job without intrusive rhetoric.

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

On narrative unity:

I want to focus on the dramatic unity of Stephanie’s piece. Notice how the story begins: (first paragraph) On the first day . … (second paragraph) On the second day…

Biblical, and not just Biblical, but Old Testament-kick ass-and-distribute-plagues Biblical. In other stories, this could be a stretch, but considering the wrath of God destruction she’s writing about, it’s nearly perfect. They don’t call the most powerful tornadoes “the Finger of God” for nothing.

On the second day, in fact, comes the key paragraph for consideration:

On the second day, they sorted through the fragments in the bright sun: ripped photos of strangers, a piece of someone else’s mattress, someone else’s medicine. When the wind blew, shards of fiberglass from someone else’s house stung their faces. Everything was someone else’s; their stuff was mostly gone.

Notice the very understated “under the bright sun” detail – Let there be light, anyone? We’ve gone from “shredded debris under a blackened sky” (aka “formless void”) to the bright sun, and a world fully populated with stuff. But there’s one phrase relating to all that stuff that is repeated four times: “someone else’s.”

This is no mistake, or redundancy; this scattering of “someone else’s” stuff triggers the action of the story. And as a stranger forms a not very rational but hugely human connection with the random “someone else” whose pay stub is blown to his doorstep, you can feel it all building to a place of great significance.

The voyage is nicely restrained. You see the collection of care packages – not of store-bought items, but personal items – stuff. The care packages arrive with more of an emotional impact than a practical one. You can see the connections being made as the lives upended by the catastrophe shift slightly and begin to settle in the new reality.

And then you get to the fabulous and well-earned unity that brings it all together and guarantees this story will mean something to many people.

The point is this: That a storm, an act of God, scatters someone else’s stuff literally to the winds; but that an almost equally powerful force, human empathy, collects someone else’s stuff and sends it back in the other direction, the direction of hope and resilience. Note the restraint, but also note the precision with which the point is driven home:

He pulled out Heather Thompson’s dolls, and Melissa Thompson’s blouse and Charlie Thompson’s shirts. He pulled out new toys for his daughters. He pulled out razors, and a brand-new Crimson Tide cap, which the Thompsons knew Corey would like because they had found photographs of him on the Internet wearing one.

“I needed a hat,” Corey said to himself, not realizing.

He emptied the boxes until the only thing left was the plain white envelope, “Corey” written on it in cursive. He opened it.

There was no note inside. No pay stub. Instead, there were $20 bills, which he fanned out and counted, $160 in all. He was quiet.

“Oh, Corey,” his dad said.

Corey Plunkett stared at all the belongings of strangers that were now his own.

Great use of dialogue in that last passage – so pared down but, because of context, so incredibly powerful and evocative of a whole world view.

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

On Voice:

I was thrilled to see a Stephanie McCrummen story come to the Roundtable. When McCrummen covered Africa, her important and extremely difficult pieces were studies in precision reporting and detail, but what has always struck me about her writing is the powerfully restrained voice.

We already know that dramatic events – hurricanes, homicide, war – tempt us to overdramatize the storytelling. While there are obvious exceptions (Michael Herr’s rollicking, slightly panicked voice in Dispatches, for instance), placid delivery can work an elegant, authoritative spell. McCrummen’s almost fairytale-like voice (the use of words such as “cottage;” the structural mileposts of “On the first day…”) is at once calm and confident, and without pretension. The pairing of the straightforward delivery and mileposts work together to move us through the story without seeing the writer at work or feeling manipulated. In other words, power comes from strong, accessible language and carefully chosen juxtapositions: “alien” and “wasteland” suggest the scope of the change that has come to the Plunkett family; the wedding veil and tree limbs suggest promise and life, upended; the deft black-sky stroke doesn’t just function as description, it suggests finality and sets up an avenue for narrative arc. If the sky is black now, will things get better? What we really want from a good narrative is to find out what happens next, and McCrummen preps us with almost lulling subtlety, not with a hammer to the temple.

By sticking to a less-is-more tone – “Everything was someone else’s; their stuff was mostly gone” – she shows allegiance to the story and its inhabitants, and respect for the reader. She’s not trying to move us; she built her story and then let it do its job.

Smart-bomb detail functions as an element of her voice. McCrummen wouldn’t have been able to build such a strong story without wide-awake reporting. She’s the kind of writer who knows when to avoid laying down a speed bump of distracting detail or device, when not to include a detail just to prove she has it in her notebook. Better yet, her smart-bombs make quick, seamless points about big concepts. By writing that Plunkett sat at his parents’ trailer (not their “kitchen table” or “home”) she cues us to lifestyle/economics – i.e., class. Nothing elaborate here, just a dollop of information without resorting to exposition. Another example: “… the pale-green paper from Corey Plunkett’s factory job…” – a kitchen-sink writer might’ve unnecessarily overlaid this with “where he works as a die caster,” etc. McCrummen is able to write with assurance and authority because of how she observes story and how she renders it: the pay stub didn’t fly above “billboards and pastures” but rather above “blank billboards and cow pastures and rising ridges.” That passage works gorgeously for its alliteration and specificity – ridges by nature rise, but here the cadence numbs us to the redundancy. Writing that Plunkett opens not just a knife but rather a hunting knife echoes the theme of survival.

Calculated restraint: Sometimes when writers choose to restrain themselves you get the feeling they’re trying to channel Hemingway or be someone they’re not. McCrummen is McCrummen. So by the time I get to the single-sentence graf “Alone in the quiet, the tattooed, bearded 25-year-old cried, and then began typing” I’m with her.

As a device, the single-sentence graf has its place but tends to be overused, especially in newspapers. The device often shows the writer banging a gong, as if to say right here I want you to cry – GONG! right here I want you to gasp – GONG! We’ve all been guilty of it, but maybe we should kick away this particular crutch a little more often. The abovementioned McCrummen graf isn’t a gong graf and here’s why: Instead of simply imparting information or trying to deliver a bolus of emotion, the sentence pivots the action forward. And the short passage of single-sentence grafs that soon follows – “First he thought: ‘My God, this has come all the way from Alabama’” and “Then, slightly sickening: ‘Gosh, I wonder if this person is okay’” – works because McCrummen is using the device as structure, in order to show thought progression and advance the narrative.

Integrity: Maybe above all I appreciated that McCrummen embraced the fact that no one could have traced the pay stub’s journey, not really. By writing that the pay stub “was probably sucked into the half-mile funnel” and “somehow floated north” and “probably over Interstate 59” and “must have crossed the Tennessee River,” etc., she gracefully shows true journalistic chops and builds reader trust.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

On focus:

Journalists too often fail to seize opportunities like this one. We cover the BIG story from 3,000 feet, and it leaves readers feeling understandably detached. Whether the subject is a storm or war or recession, we need to take our lens and focus as tight as possible.

Say to one scrap of paper.

I applaud Stephanie McCrummen – and her editor – for seeing the story. For understanding that this random connection between two families had the potential to illustrate the devastation more than a sweep of the countryside.

It all starts there. The reporter has to make a choice about what the “story” is and then report for that story. That’s instead of unloading a notebook full of facts and observations and interviews with people who say it sounded like a freight train coming through. What you get with that approach is a story that’s a mile wide and an inch deep.

What we want is a story that’s an inch wide and a mile deep. That’s how you reveal that helplessness is having no toothbrush and losing the journals where you scrawled your secrets. And how you discover what drives someone to care less about himself than a stranger whose name appears on a pay stub. The more focused the story, the deeper the reporter can go, the better the chance that it will deliver an emotional wallop.

So far, this has been the most memorable of all the tornado stories I’ve seen this year. There are many reasons why (other editors will highlight some of those), but first and foremost, this writer had the courage to commit.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

On the importance of being there:

I tell reporters who are just starting out that – as good as they might be at working the phones and scouring the Internet for information – there’s nothing that replaces “being there.” Stephanie McCrummen demonstrates the benefits of traveling to both Rainsville and Hixson, and witnessing several scenes there.

Getting story ideas. I’d be interested to find out how McCrummen learned about the Plunketts and Thompsons. I’m willing to bet she heard about their e-mails when she got to Rainsville. More often than not, reporters get these story ideas by being out in the field, talking to a lot of people, and keeping their eyes and ears open for what intrigues them.

Gaining trust. McCrummen gained the trust of both families by visiting them and spending time with them. They were willing to show her things and tell her things that would be difficult to do with just a phone conversation. We learn that Charles Thompson has anti-depressants on his desk, that his wife has written him a love poem, that his family has a ripped leather couch, that his daughter has Down syndrome.

We learn more about his family’s financial situation:

When a guest comes, Thompson, who mistrusts the government and half-joked about the tornadoes being generated by a secret military project in Alaska, offers his desk chair. He used to work in a photo studio, but since his wife’s stroke, he stays home. They live on two disability checks totaling about $1,800 a month.

Evoking emotions. By being in Rainsville, McCrummen observed people’s emotions and the events surrounding them. She then evoked those feelings by putting the reader within the scene without explicitly labeling anything. Take, for example, the tonal shift between the church scene and the Plunketts in their field:

At Brown’s Chapel Baptist church, a preacher stood under a broad, broken oak and offered that God had not caused the tornadoes but was there to help people through the aftermath, and they all sang “Near the Cross.”

In the green field, Corey Plunkett and his wife continued to pick through debris, trying to make sense of things, starting with the idea of nothingness.

Developing plot. McCrummen develops her plot through short scenes and dialogue, all of which are hard to reconstruct simply through interviews. It’s hard to imagine that she could have crafted the ending of her story without being there:

He emptied the boxes until the only thing left was the plain white envelope, “Corey” written on it in cursive. He opened it.

There was no note inside. No pay stub. Instead, there were $20 bills, which he fanned out and counted, $160 in all. He was quiet.

“Oh, Corey,” his dad said.

——

Read our interview with Stephanie McCrummen – find out why she wanted bare-bones language and how her editor helped her nail the ending. And in two weeks, we’ll post our second Editors’ Roundtable for June.

May Editors’ Roundtable: St. Petersburg Times dives into missing man mystery

Andrea Pitzer — Wed, 04 May 2011 15:02:10 +0000

This month, the Editors’ Roundtable looks at “When a diver goes missing, a deep cave is scene of a deeper mystery” by Ben Montgomery of the St. Petersburg Times. The story, our first newspaper narrative for the Roundtable, tells the tale of Ben McDaniel, who disappeared at Vortex Spring in August of last year.

Each month, we talk to the reporter who wrote the story while the editors pass around their comment sheet. The editors write about the piece without hearing from the reporter; the reporter talks about the piece without knowing what the editors will say. Tomorrow, we’ll post our interview with Montgomery [update: interview is now up], but here, we offer our editors’ take. Comments appear in the order in which they were made. For full bios on our editors, see our January post announcing the Roundtable.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

There are so many things to like about this story. For starters, it’s nice to see a piece that is essentially straight chronology, from beginning to end. You watch it play out as it happened, and you know what the people in the story knew at the time, so you’re trying to figure out the mystery as they did.

I love how patient Montgomery was with this story. (Full disclosure: I’m a fan of Montgomery’s, and he works with a close friend of mine.) He introduces the situation, you meet all the important characters, and he keeps probing. Montgomery never rushes. He helps the reader to understand what the divers are looking for and what they see or don’t see (strong reporting there), and he builds up the frustration – for the parents and the sheriff and the girlfriend. He walks through every possibility – accident, foul play, escape, suicide. You start to want answers as much as the people who are looking for the diver.

I do think there are a few places where Montgomery reaches and didn’t need to. For instance, he says that at 6-feet-2 and 220 pounds, the diver was hard to miss. That doesn’t sound like a particularly large man to me. And boy, he went too deep – no pun intended – when he waxed about what exists at the end of the line.

Maybe it narrows to nothing, or maybe it opens to another chamber, another world, a far away place that few believe Ben could go.

Narnia?

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

About two-thirds of the way through this piece, I thought, “Uh oh – he’s not going to tell me what happened.” And while this is brilliantly reported, and beautifully written, I wonder if a slightly different focus would have helped the reader feel less dismayed when they realized the answer to the mystery was not forthcoming.

Montgomery is very strong at building tension and momentum. He is great with details – the chat board messages, the crisp list of dangers of cave diving (“the silt can blind”), the 10-inch hole (though that should have been mentioned only once, not twice). He can turn lovely phrases. (Such as, maybe Ben “ascended into a new life” And the strong last line.) And he has the mechanics of pacing, and pivoting, down very well, ending each section with drama and at a point where I absolutely must read on.

But since the mystery remains a mystery, it seems to me that it would have helped to have a stronger driving question than “what happened?,” since that question is not answered. One suggestion: Perhapsfocusing on Emily Greer would have worked – since she ends the piece, and she sort of represents hope and the future and the possibility of eventual resolution, she might have been cast as a stronger character throughout the piece, which could document her journey from happy girlfriend to bereft girlfriend to determined girlfriend.

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Ben Montgomery is a top-notch writer because he is a top-notch reporter. His precision with details brings authority to his storytelling. To see that, read the first section closely. You learn about the temperature and weak breeze the day Ben McDaniel disappeared; the temperature of the spring; what McDaniel was wearing; the fact that he was testing his equipment and jotting in his dive log before he went for the dive; the words on the warning signs at the mouth of the cave.

I also admired the reporting Montgomery must have done to understand the history and dangers of cave-diving – and to be able to describe the mouth of the cave, the narrowing tunnel, the gate and the tight spots.

I agree with Laurie: Montgomery’s challenge here is that the diver’s disappearance remains unsolved. I’m not saying we should avoid telling stories with unsolved mysteries. But, in order to approach a satisfying end, the storyteller needs to discover some other resolution, large or small. Maybe Montgomery’s point is that, when we lose loved ones (especially those who disappear without a trace), we’re left with holes that we can’t fill.

I would have encouraged Montgomery to frame the story even more so from McDaniel’s parents’ or girlfriend’s vantage point, and then figure out what epiphany they might have experienced. Perhaps it’s enough to say that, living with that terrible loss, they committed themselves to making sure the diver would not be forgotten.

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

What I like most about this piece is the simplicity, the almost “Dragnet” accumulation of short, clear sentences that patiently lay out the forking maze of a conundrum, pursuing one possible line of explanation after the next, only to reach a blank wall every time. I disagree that the failure to come up with a solution, to answer the mystery, is a failing. In fact, I think it is the whole point of this piece, and I think Montgomery realized that and then set out to write precisely about that – the lack of a reasonable explanation, no matter which way you turn; the way there are things in the world that defy logic and refuse explanation.

There were a few times when he got too enamored with the poetry of his writing. He pulls off a great moment and gets at something real:

Every time you challenge yourself, every time you overcome your fear of the dark and tight spaces and death, you resurface more alive, born into a new world. The air smells cleaner. Food tastes better. Sex is sweeter.

Then he follows it with a line that’s pure pose:

Who knows what exists at the end of the line? Maybe it narrows to nothing, or maybe it opens to another chamber, another world, a far away place that few believe Ben could go.

Unfortunately, he steps off a cliff at the end when he says of the girlfriend:

She’s been thinking lately about what it might look like down there in the dark. She may never get over this without knowing what’s past the last restriction. She dives, not in caves, not yet. But she could. She’s much smaller than Ben. She could fit.

This is either really her thought, that she wants to go past the last obstacle, in which case he erred badly by not saying so explicitly. Or, she has no intention of doing that, in which case he was being dishonest.

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

My own full disclosure: I once participated in a three-day writers’ conference in the wilds of southeast Georgia with Ben, who’s a mensch and a fine musician in addition to being a fine writer. Like Maria, I’m a fan of his.

The story is deeply reported and beautifully written, but I agree with Laurie and Tom that it didn’t overcome the problem posed by the unresolved mystery. Ben might have attacked the problem head-on, foreshadowing it early and then writing more about the agonies of unexplained disappearances, perhaps in place of the purple passage Maria cited. As it is, the what-happened-next approach builds our anticipation and can’t help but leave us disappointed when we realize we won’t find out what ultimately happened.

Couple of quibbles: The chronology in Memphis was a little fuzzy to me – when did Ben’s business and marriage go kablooey, and when did he reconnect with Emily? – and I missed a general description of Vortex Spring, which I couldn’t quite picture: What does it all look like, where is the dive shop, etc.? Still, the story grabbed me. The writing is spare and vivid, the pacing just right, and I cared about the characters. Great work.

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

Montgomery weaves a tale that lures you ever forward to learn what happened next? That is craft, not trickery. Pay special attention to foreshadowing and cliffhangers. Montgomery plots this as a movie, setting up the core character and suspense, then hopscotching from scene to scene, leaving bread crumbs along the trail: warning signs at the cave, jimmied gate lock, abandoned air tanks.

Study the reporting for depth (broad cast of characters), detail (dollars in the wallet, name of the dog), precision (size and shape of the cave and the bodies worming through it) and creativity (gin-clear water). Great writing is born of great reporting. Montgomery reports.

Flaws:

The story is unduly long. Basic redundancies could have been excised with a squeegee edit.

Too many confusions. What triggered call to cops? Did Ben go through the keyed gate when the other divers saw him disappear? When did the girlfriend enter his life?

Ending. Casts story in a new light with a late-appearing and underdeveloped character.

This is a good yarn about an unsolved local mystery and the people caught up in it. That should be enough (though, alas, that might be a hard sell to editors these days). But it overreaches, forcing the mystery into a morality tale. Dial back the gothic (especially a lot of the soul-searching lines, which tip from show over to tell) and let it be what it is: a mosaic of people connected by and unable to shake this mystery.

For more, read our Q-and-A with Ben Montgomery, who talks about how and why he chose his ending and the importance of having a group of readers you trust. And if there’s a particular piece you’d like to see dissected by the Roundtable, send a link for the story to contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org. Stories must be already published, available online and strong enough to stand some tough love.

April Editors’ Roundtable: GQ dives into the personal consequences of war

Andrea Pitzer — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 14:00:55 +0000

Stop shopping for your Easter bonnet, and put down those 1040s – it’s time for a new Editors’ Roundtable! This session, our editors are looking at Michael Paterniti’s “The Boy from Gitmo,” which ran in the February issue of GQ. Paterniti’s piece explores the relationship between Mohammed Jawad, a boy who was sent to Guantánamo Bay eight years ago, and Eric Montalvo, the defense attorney who represented him at trial. We’ve also posted a talk with Paterniti, but here, our editors weigh in with their thoughts on the mechanics and memorable elements of the story.

Comments appear in the order in which they were made. We asked editors to note what they thought did and didn’t work in the piece, and to explain why. (For full bios of the group, see our January post announcing the Roundtable.)

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

As you read “The Boy from Gitmo,” pay attention to Michael Paterniti’s decisions.

He starts the story in the middle of the action. We’re in the C-130 with Eric Montalvo. He’s thinking: “What the fuck have I gotten myself into now?” Paterniti allows the mystery to unfold.

He controls the point of view. He tells the story primarily through Montalvo’s perspective. But there are passages where we shift POV – the scene where the two U.S. soldiers get injured and a few passages on the boy’s experience at Gitmo. In a story with several characters, the writer selects who has the primary POV, and who, if anyone, has the secondary POV.

He tells half the story before identifying the prisoner. We know him as “the boy” or “the kid,” only learning his full name when a judge rules him no longer detainable. We realize the prisoner is not only young, but stripped of his identity.

He uses surprising language, transcending standard description. Some Kabul glimpses: “the ash taste of burning refuse blooming,” “a low cloud of dust sparkles,” “the women cocooned in blue burkas.”

I wanted more about Montalvo’s history. We learn just a bit about a friend’s murder and Montalvo’s discovery about his father. A little more context would have helped me understand his motives: “Being here this time, too, has triggered that unconscious need to do something for those who can’t do for themselves.”

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

Paterniti did a great job of reporting this piece and figuring out a theme and a structure, and he worked just as hard when it came to the writing of it. He never slacks off. His descriptions are terrific and his verbs are surprising and strong: Things stalk and ping and wedge and sweep and skitter and butterfly. (Butterfly! What a great and unexpected verb.)

Montalvo is “slightly fattened.” The boy feels a “spindled pain” in his head. The view of Cuba from the plane is brief but brings an instant picture to mind. The piece is a delight to read.

As Tom says, the point of view is primarily Montalvo’s, and so Paterniti uses language that Montalvo would use. But when he switches, for a nanosecond, to another POV, he does it deftly. Again, it’s all about careful selection of words. (The boy wonders what judge or “wizard” will make the decision to get him out of Gitmo – “wizard” is brilliant, because it reflects his complete bafflement and lack of understanding of the process.)

Regarding structure: It’s basically straight narrative, starting when he heads off to Cuba, ending some years later in Kabul. But there are crucial pivots to work in the background, and, again, he does this deftly. The pivots are short and vivid and they, too, are narrative. There’s no leaden backstory here, no plodding experts. The action, even though it is not always going forward, never stops.

The last line is powerful, but I wonder if it is truly earned – despite Montalvo’s demons, I think it applies more to the boy than it does to Montalvo himself. It was the only thing about the story that I questioned.

Kelley Benham
Enterprise editor, St. Petersburg Times

I also tripped over the last line, but only the last line. The story carried me along effortlessly for more than 9,000 words.

The headline and blurb lead the reader to believe this story is about the boy, but it’s about the lawyer. The boy causes some key changes in Montalvo and how he sees the world, and the boy shows the reader something new as well, but we see it from Montalvo’s perspective. That’s why it’s a problem that I don’t understand him better. Like Tom, I finished the story hungry for more on his background and his motivation. I wanted more emotional punch.

Paterniti attempts to address this in a couple places, most notably here: “Montalvo will never be able to explain it to them, or anyone. Not even his kids. This boy needs him. It’s that simple.” But I found that unsatisfying. After such a long story, I wanted a richer conclusion.

That said, this is a gorgeous story. It’s a schooling in descriptive writing and in use of language. Paterniti always leaves me marveling at his ability to put me under a spell.

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

This is one of those rare pieces of journalism that reads, front to back, end to end, like a fine work of fiction. It allows the reader to inhabit a world, inside out, and a stream of riveting events, characters and conflicts that flow from beginning to end.

It does this through

1) Language – telling the story in words that convincingly mimic the spoken cadence of contemporary American warriors thrust into the hellish belly of wars in alien and hostile territory. Consider this first moment where the story suddenly lifts you out of your complacency and places you back down on the edge of your seat, where you stay for the rest of the wild ride. As the attorney meets the terrorist he is assigned to defend, shackled to the floor, the two have this exchange:

“Don’t you know that if that door were opened and we both were out there free, I’d kill you?” Nothing has prepared Montalvo for this kind of venom, but his reaction is visceral. He leans forward and says, “Don’t you know that if that door were open and we both were free, I’d kill you first?”

Wow. And when the attorney meets the possibly innocent child accused of throwing a grenade at American soldiers:

Despite everything, the alleged enemy seemed, well, hopeful. As if a clerical error had been made. Like the boy believes he should be going home soon, once he’s been heard by the president or judge or wizard, whoever’s in charge.

The wizard. Beautiful!

2) Absolutely stunning detail, vividly described but not overcooked. Describing the grenade attack:

In the next instant, Lyons lies slumped over the wheel, unresponsive, blood gushing from a tear in his femoral artery. His legs are mangled; his left foot is missing a toe. Meanwhile, Martin, who’s still in the passenger seat, looks down at his hands to find them covered in blood. But whose?

There are some misfires, but they are insignificant compared to the overall achievement here. Unfortunately the primary fault is in the lead. Let’s retire the “This is a story about” gimmick in the first sentence. WAY overused and totally unnecessary in such an amazing tale as this. If tempted to use that, force yourself to think of something powerfully unique to this story.

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

Ditto the writing lessons: sparkling verbs, language steeped in situation and character, narrative structure that spools out like a surreal movie. The “wizard” behind this piece is Paterniti himself.

Note the reporting behind that wizardry:

Interviewing: Few traditional quotes. External and internal dialog, and other interview-based storytelling, develop character and put readers in the scene.

Background and documents: Lyrical writing is grounded in deep, fundamental reporting – homework essential to credible narrative.

Observation: Descriptions of place and action give the story the quality of being not so much read as experienced.

Yet I found too-frequent speed bumps:

Confusion of time, place and character. I often had to backtrack to orient myself. The lead defense attorney comes out of nowhere. What is a “bad attorney’s back”? Who apprehended the suspects at the bomb site? Over what time period did the boy’s weight drop? Deft time and place cues would help ease shifting time sequences. Attention to pronouns would delineate multiple characters. (Sometimes the story reads as if passages were cut, then not rewoven.)

Transparency. Paterniti’s signature use of detail often serves as its own implied attribution. But this subject is politicized and opaque (which makes the reporting all the more impressive). A few sophisticated clues – direct or secondary sourcing, first-hand or reconstructed scenes – would aid understanding and trust.

Cohesion. Was this primarily about Montalvo’s motivation, which seemed underdeveloped, or about abuses at Gitmo and beyond? The opening and ending didn’t tie the whole together.

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

Disclosure: Mike is a friend.

All I can do is echo my colleagues, particularly with regard to Montalvo’s motivation and the risks of helping Jawad. As an editor, I’d have had few large questions: Why the talk about a court martial, for instance? I didn’t understand how Montalvo’s actions rose to the criminal level.

Other edits are at the local level. The conflicting use of italics: Early on ital indicates Montalvo’s thoughts (What does a forty-pound dip in a growing male indicate?) but the device kind of wanes. Also, I’ve have pushed for small tweaks: “Unlike the al-Bahluls of the world, who face their incarceration with defiance – spitting and throwing feces at the guards – the boy is known to call out his mother’s name in the moments of his deepest despair.” It wasn’t clear whether Jawad called her given name (surely not) or “Mother” or what. Dialing it in: “Unlike the al-Bahluls of the world, who face their incarceration with defiance – spitting and throwing feces at the guards – the boy is known to call for his mother in moments of deepest despair,” or even: “The al-Bahluls of the world face their incarceration with defiance – spitting and throwing feces at the guards; in the boy’s moments of deepest despair he is known to call for his mother.” By ending the sentence on the strongest possible word, this option would leave us at “mother,” which is more emotionally powerful even than “despair.”

But do you see how I’m reaching?

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

I love this piece. What affected me most was the sheer feeling of it – the outrage, frustration and despair. The story works brilliantly as a metaphor for U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. Many of the same forces that make it impossible for Montalvo to help Jawad – fear, corruption, conflicting agendas, mutual incomprehension – also doom the U.S. effort in Central Asia. It’s a great example of using a small story to illuminate a larger one. I didn’t feel shortchanged on Montalvo’s motivation. We get enough of it, and if there’s still some mystery there, well, who knows what finally motivates people?

The one awkward break in chronology comes at the end, when Jawad’s flight to Pakistan is inserted before the final scene of Montalvo and Jawad in Kabul. The story changes focus and point of view seamlessly, with one minor exception: During a description of Jawad’s interrogation that seems to come from government documents, we suddenly read something that could only have come from Jawad or from the writer’s imagination: “They keep … blasting him with words until he loses his grip on them, until an opaque glow comes between him and them….”

Many of the descriptions are terrific: the “arid land of organ-pipe cacti and big loping rodents called banana rats”; the taxi “hitting people with the open door as it goes, the bloody legs dangling”; the boy appearing “again and again in Gitmo’s strange pointillism, hungry, lonely, trading for whatever he can.” There’s the occasional head-scratcher (“a hollow thud, like an empty bottle rolling on the floor”) and non sequitur (“al-Bahlul is also among the most doctrinaire, having been locked away in solitary for years”), but these are minor quibbles. To repeat, I love the story, and it’s all about the feeling.

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

I agree with so much of what’s been celebrated, particularly about the terrific reporting and word choice.

I also love this story for its restraint. Writers sometimes struggle with drama. They feel compelled to make sure you understand that THIS IS A DRAMATIC MOMENT. Here, Paterniti never overdoes it.

This scene is brilliant:

In a room, she waits for her son. And then comes a young man with an impressive beard and blemished skin, a heavy brow, and dark, penetrating eyes. Her first reaction is, no, there must be some mistake here. But the man insists he belongs to her. She reaches out, to touch his head, her hand to the spot where her son had always had a knob, and then she knows and can’t speak anymore, holding him close.

Look at what he didn’t include.

Great lessons here as well in how to use dialogue and quotes. The voice in Montalvo’s head conveys a lot of the doubt and angst he has about his personal choice, and what he says out loud is essentially him answering his own questions. He’s explaining why he had to get involved. It’s very effective.

I do think the writer is trying too hard with the lead. And like others, I thought the ending felt wrong. The attorney doesn’t seem free – in fact, quite the opposite. Also, the idea that “this boy needs him” exposed the emotional crater in the story. I related to Montalvo as a parent, and that’s what tied me in knots. The most wrenching dilemma here is whether he loses his own family to save this kid.

Some would say this story isn’t so much about the attorney as it is about America’s bad behavior and the madness we’ve created, but I’d say, I’ve read that story. I was drawn in by this man’s quest to right a wrong.

—–

See what Michael Paterniti has to say about his story, and stay tuned for the next installment of the Editors’ Roundtable in early May. (Or check out prior Editors’ Roundtables.) In the meantime, if you have a piece you’d like to see our editors dissect, please send it along to contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org. The story has to be already published, available online and worth a tug or two at its seams to see how it works.

Nieman Storyboard - A project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard » Maria Carrillo

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April Editors’ Roundtable: GQ dives into the personal consequences of war

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Laurie Hertzel Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

Kelley Benham Enterprise editor, St. Petersburg Times

Tom Shroder Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

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Paige Williams Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

Chris Hunt Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

Maria Carrillo Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Kelley Benham
Enterprise editor, St. Petersburg Times

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

Kelley Benham
Enterprise editor, St. Petersburg Times

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

Tom Huang
Sunday and enterprise editor, The Dallas Morning News

Laurie Hertzel
Senior editor for books and special projects, Star Tribune

Kelley Benham
Enterprise editor, St. Petersburg Times

Tom Shroder
Founding editor, www.storysurgeons.com

Jacqui Banaszynski
Knight Chair professor, Missouri School of Journalism

Paige Williams
Narrative writing instructor, Nieman Foundation

Chris Hunt
Assistant managing editor, Sports Illustrated

Maria Carrillo
Managing editor, The Virginian-Pilot