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WORLD Magazine / Telling the Truth / Chapter Five | |
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| Organizing for Readablity | ||
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Reporters who do not practice directed journalism often find that when they have finished their reporting and interviewing, they have a writhing mass of factoids in search of a theme. This may happen to you but it should not happen very often, because you should have been asking yourself at every step of the process: "What do I have?" Your goal–like that of the great film director John Ford–is to be "cutting in your head" even while the event is occurring or the cameras are rolling. Organization is not something to think about after you already have done your reporting: think about your expected outcome before and during reporting.
Thematically, you want to emerge from the reporting and interviewing process with your thesis–your idea of what the story is all about–either supported or changed. From the point at which your thesis solidifies, you are no longer looking for evidence that disproves it (although you should take into account any that emerges); from that point on you are building your case as an honest lawyer would, bringing out supporting evidence and refuting what appears to undermine your case but actually does not. Organizational Strategies A circular story begins and ends in the same location or situation; the reader is shown various sites while swinging around the circle. Here is how Roy Maynard’s previously cited story on prisons began:
The story then proceeds through various interviews and anecdotes that show how those from various perspectives and backgrounds have come to similar views.
Chuck Colson served time in prison two decades ago, in the wake of the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal. He, too, emphasizes changing hearts. . . . The article ends where it began, with Eugene pointing to the cross and saying:
He looked over at the threatened cross, and added, "They took God out of schools. Hope they don’t do that here." A spatial story, instead of bringing readers circularly to the place where they began, tries to give them a closer look at a subject by moving them from outside to inside, or room by room through a house, or house by house down a street. Here is an example of how to start:
A huge trash pile along one side of the building smells of urine and sparkles with empty bottles of Wild Irish Rose and other cheap hits. On the inside, a dark staircase leading to the second-floor editorial department is brightened only by a taped-up flyer offering comfort to "Lesbian Survivors of Abusive Relationships." Then, the reader is brought inside:
Next comes the introduction of the main character:
From that point on the article takes readers deeper into Hentoff’s views and background. In a sense, a spatial story is like beginning with a wide-angle lens and then moving in; it can also work the other way, by starting with a telephoto lens and providing a close-up, then moving out.
For comparing rhetoric and reality, a parallel story, which uses the cutting back-and-forth approach familiar from movies, often works better than the circular or spatial variety. For example, a story in 1994 headlined, "Congress Coddles Social Work Lobby as Children Languish in Abusive Homes," began with a discussion of legislation.
Last week Senate Democrats came roaring back to Washington promising to pass comparable legislation to "show compassion" and prove that the Bush administration’s concern for families is all slogan without substance. In stately Senate offices and private dining rooms, liberal senators pledged their commitment to "family preservation" that would leave no child without a haven amidst heartlessness.
Then came the reality, italicized in the article to make clear the alternation.
Back to the legislators:
On Capitol Hill, where lawmakers say the word and create a federal bureaucracy out of nothing, the child welfare program has a simple solution–more money. Whenever a child is killed emotionally or even physically by an abusive parent, the story is the same–the system is overloaded and underfunded. While Congress is trying to give more money to child welfarists in order to "preserve families," critics charge that the child welfare system is so deeply flawed that bigger bucks will not help. . .
And to the streets:
The alternating portraits directed readers’ attention to the legislators’ distance from reality.
A linear story (sometimes euphemistically called the "string of pearls") is the most straightforward of the common organizational varieties. It starts with a lively lead, then begins adding details and characters, and stops when enough scenes have piled up to make the point. If the scenes are good enough, the artlessness of the structure does not particularly matter. For example, here is a good opening to a story about the yearning of some Americans for Canadian-style health care:
In Faustian legend and lore–especially as told by 16th century English dramatist Christopher Marlowe in his play, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, Faust made his pact with the devil: his soul the price for magical powers. After 24 years, Faust was dragged down to Hell.
Where Marlowe meets modern politics is in the awe with which some American politicians regarded Canada’s health care system for nearly a quarter of a century.
Canada, it can be argued, is the face that launched a thousand congressional bills and burnt the towers and high-rise office buildings of the American health care system.
But in exchange for a promised magical cure to a free-market health care system’s ills, Canada sold its soul to a quasi-socialist system, and exactly 24 years later is finding that the deal struck was no bargain at all. Then come various expert appraisals, followed by the reporter’s analysis:
Individuals with exotic illnesses, in need of specialized care, quickly enter into Canada’s queue zone. They take their place in line and wait and wait, often suffering great pain and prolonged worry, hoping to be treated by a specialist before they are incapacitated."
Next is the reporter’s direct summary of the various analyses:
Just when the article threatens to become a policy-wonk piece, the reporter provides "a face," someone to personalize the story, and also provides more description of the environment.
As he spoke with World last week, Muecke tossed around a football–only his hands were paying attention to it–and he reflected on the Canadian system he’d seen since 1986, when he began to play in the CFL: "It feels great to people, because when they go to the doctor, they know they won’t have to pay anything–no money will leave their pockets. But they know they make it up in taxes."
Concluding paragraphs provided other specific indictments of the Canadian system and led to the end.
Other types of structures are also usable; you need to find the right structure for your particular material and theme. Circular structures often contribute to a sense that lots of people are talking about problems but few people are finding solutions. Alternating structure works well when you are contrasting biblical and ungodly approaches. Locational structure provides a sense of looking deeper into an issue, situation, or personality.
If you are having a hard time figuring out how to tell your story, ask yourself questions such as: What interested me about this story? What is it really about? What do I want to teach the reader? If you did not have a firm focus when you started your reporting and interviewing, you certainly need one at this point. You may be able to find your focus by listing crucial conclusions and seeing what you know after doing your research that you did not know before.
The key to successful organizing of a major story is a firm grasp of your theme. You need to be able to summarize your main theme in a sentence that has a noun and a verb; in other words, subject plus action. You will then be ready to see if you have sharpened your angle enough to be able to write a tight article rather than a dithering report.
Whether you are certain or uncertain as to your theme and main points, your next step is to organize your material; if you are uncertain, you may end up reorganizing many times, but it is essential to start on the sorting process anyway. (As you organize, you often will realize that the story you thought was about "x" is actually about "y," with "x " as a subtheme.)
One way to organize as you prepare to write a story is to divide your material into main sections and subsections, either on a computer or using index cards. If you use cards, you may wish to list important points on individual cards, try out the various arrangements, and then develop a plan that can and should be rough. Elaborate outlines tend to be wastes of time as you get into the flow of your writing. As you organize, you want to develop a list of your major points in the order that you think they should go; your outline should be a spine, not a corpse, and it should be brief enough so that you can do quick spinal taps as you think about your material.
Then, as you fish through your notes and folders and try to organize within sections, remember to mix up the three types of evidences and arguments that you are about to provide: narration, description, and quotation. For example, here is the continuation of the story on the culture war in San Francisco, beginning with a long but yeasty quotation.
Then came a narrative showing homosexual power in San Francisco:
Catcalls greeted a Christian psychologist’s criticism of Project 10. Jean Harris, a lesbian official with a bullhorn, tried to reason with the 200-plus crowd in the room: "I know it’s ugly and hateful. Let him get it over with."
Outside, according to Mrs. McIlhenny, an assortment of homosexual activists including gay men dressed as nuns (Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence) and drag queens waited.
The bully tactics didn’t surprise Donna McIlhenny; it was the board’s reaction to two tearful mothers after the unanimous vote for Project 10 that shocked her.
Then description, conveyed in an active way:
After further description came a second round, beginning with a quotation.
A similar question is put to McIlhenny: Why would any Christian choose to live and minister in San Francisco? "I didn’t," he admitted. "I’ve tried to leave. We’ve had calls to other churches, even, but things just never worked out."
Then narration (broken up by a quotation):
"Instead of transferring from the church, I had to tell them [members of the presbytery] that we’ve all got to get lawyers," he explained. "We were here for the duration."
Then more quotation:
"We won the case [based] on the free exercise clause," Whitehead said. "There was talk of an appeal, but that’s all it was. They [gays] knew that if it lost in San Francisco, it wouldn’t win anywhere else. There was a lot of clamoring in other cities, a lot of city councils considering similar measures. But when we won, the clamoring stopped for a while. They had been watching the case closely."
But the victory was only temporary. . . .
Then historical narrative, which is not left to stand alone but is connected with the story of the article’s leading subject.
"I was in school at the time–I was taking a master’s degree at San Francisco State, just down the street from us," McIlhenny explained. "That day I went into the student quad and everyone was standing around watching the television. We knew that would turn the whole movement around–that a martyr was created."
After showing a familiarity with the particular San Francisco scene, the author could then back off slightly and use a wider angle.
But a little exposition of this sort goes a long way; the particular gift we can give to readers is more description.
With our hands in our coats in the damp, chilling San Francisco night, we passed below the balcony of a lesbian club. Women shouted good-natured abuse at friends and strangers, worn-out gay and lesbian slogans, and sheer nonsense from the balcony, but Denny and Michael took no notice; it was just part of the Castro.
The bars were beginning to announce last call. Although the after-hours places–the espresso bars, the 24-hour restaurants–would remain open and active, a sense of desperation was evident. Men began leaving with other men; those who remained gripped their drinks tightly or left for a quick look into other bars.
Michael seemed determined to make it to yet another bar before closing time. I was a little surprised; because neither he nor Denny had made any sexual advances toward me or other men so far that night, it appeared they were involved in an exclusive relationship, at least for now. I asked Michael why he seemed determined to press on to another bar.
And a closing quotation:
That type of movement keeps any particular section from hanging heavy. As you organize your material, make sure that you are interspersing the various ways of showing–and try to use them all, so that you can keep telling to a minimum.
Pacing is vital–and you can control it by pausing for description after you introduce major characters. For example, after a rapid-fire lead about a desperate, unemployed logger, it is time for a pastoral that allows readers to catch their breaths.
The late spring landscape of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula probably favors the delicate brush strokes of a watercolor over the firmer brush strokes of an oil. The creator’s soft touch enhances rather than diminishes the brilliant colors.
The snow-covered peaks of the Olympic Mountains can be seen from the peninsula’s surrounding waters and occasionally through clearings in the forest. But beneath the canopy of pine, alder, cedar, hemlock, and the vital Douglas fir ("Doug fir" to the logger), the scene is less than magnificent.
There is a new and unwelcome silence in the shadowy forest. A once thriving and productive species known as the American timberman has been driven out of his critical habitat–unprotected by the hovering wings of the Endangered Species Act.
Other ways to control pacing include alternation: After readers read through statistics or difficult exposition, reward them with anecdote, colorful detail, or humor. Scatter gold coins throughout the story; readers who find several will keep on reading for more. The key: Show–do not just tell.
Remember throughout that your publication can be a travel guide, taking readers to areas or situations that may be foreign to them, as in the San Francisco story or in this article from the other side of the country.
"They walk along the sidewalks, and you’ll see them looking into the gutters for old crack vials, in hopes of finding one with a little crack left at the bottom," says the 28-year-old paralegal. "Sometimes they find enough; maybe that day your car won’t get broken into."
Whenever possible, try to provide part of the answer, the "who cares?" question by broadening the scope and appeal of your story: Show its relevance to a national audience. For the most part your reporting will come from one specific locale, but if you hope to show readers that the problem of culture wars between Christians and their opponents is spreading, you should bring in many examples and have vignettes about each.
For example, the story about Christians vs. lesbians was set in Ovett, Mississippi, but the author explained that it was a microcosm of:
Recent examples of similar instances around the nation include:
–Salem, Mass., where about 3,000 of the town’s 38,000 people are active witches and feminist goddess worshipers; they are now the dominant cultural influence in the town.
–Fairfield, Iowa, where three of the City Council’s seven members are followers of Transcendental Meditation guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Of the town’s 10,000 residents, 2,500 have come to the farming community to study TM; in the 1970s, the guru’s followers bought a bankrupt college and turned it into Maharishi International University, a Mecca for TM practitioners.
–Antelope, Ore., where sex guru Bhagwan Shree Rajineesh moved his sect in the early ‘80s, literally smothering the tiny indigenous population of 40.
Whenever possible, put information of this sort high up in your organization plan. Announcements that suggest that cultural trends in one area will be "coming soon to a theater near you" make readers care. They help you avoid the readers’ reactions signified in these two acronymns: MEGO (Mine Eyes Glaze Over) and TEK (This Everybody Knows).
Editors and reporters should discuss organizational questions early on. A good editor would rather coach early in the process than fix later on; both methods improve stories, but coaching can improve journalists as well. A reporter should not be offended if an editor reads the draft and then comes back with questions like, What’s your theme? What are the most interesting things you saw? What’s your evidence for this? What did it look like? What does the reader need to know? How can you clarify this?
The editor’s key role at this point is in what is called structural editing, an analysis of how the story moves from start to finish. Editors may demand reorganization: The editor’s job is to explain why, and the reporter’s task is to be of good cheer through what is at times a painful process. As a reporter, you will tend to feel that everything you have written is important, but a story in which everything is equal most often has the excitement of a posed class or team photograph. A good editor is antiegalitarian, emphasizing certain elements and downgrading the importance of others.
A stickler for emphasis will place the most important words at the beginning or the end of the sentence, the most important sentences at the beginning or the end of paragraphs, the most important paragraphs at the beginning or the end of stories. He will add emphasis also by arranging ideas within a sentence from least to most important, by varying sentence length, by repeating key words or phrases, and by parallel structure. He will always insist on logical order, and so should each writer: Do not dither as you write, but order elements by chronology, by space (right to left, east to west, and so forth), or by order of climax.
Shorter Stories
For 65 years that has been so. The nominee of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (known by its Spanish acronym PRI) has been assured the presidency. . . . Something is different this time.
One key to a successful short article is to find the telling joke, the telling anecdote–and to do that you have to know your subject well enough to know what is important and what is trivial. In a quarter-mile sprint you particularly need to highlight the revealing exchanges.
There are practical differences as well between organizing for shorter and longer stories. If you write a long story you probably will have extensive notes on many interviews, photocopies of background material, and much else beside. You may need to organize your research by placing all of your materials in folders and then by making divisions within the folders. One folder is sufficient for a shorter article: You need one good, straightforward story to tell, and you need to go right at it.
The THAW process
Each of those four phases has several elements: If you were in my class and wanted to remember those elements, I would ask you to picture a Great Dane taking photographs, and then see the following headline describing the event: Fans’ Dane Uses Lens. The first word, FANS’Face, Attitude, News hook, Surprisesummarizes four questions I would ask you about your story idea. First, what is your face–your way of personalizing a story? Second, what attitude toward your material will you be able to express? (For a Christian, that will relate to the class of rapids in which the story should be placed.) Third, do you have a news hook–a way of relating your story to a current event? Fourth, will there be any surprise for the readers in what you write? (The classic journalistic phrase for something that will surprise readers is, "man bites dog.")
Next, to describe the ways in which to hunt for elements of a story, picture a Great DANE: Description, Attribution, Narrative, Exposition. That means setting the scene through description; interviewing the characters to garner quotations, so that ideas do not float in nothingness but are attributable to particular individuals; showing the action in a narrative, story-telling fashion; and explaining when necessary through straight exposition. As you go out reporting, think about the elements you will need: If you have lots of quotations and adequate descriptive material, be sure to get action adventure material; if you have lots of narrative, be sure to get some quotations; and so on.
The third word, Fan’s Dane USES Lens, provides a way of analyzing what you have (and informing your editor) once you have finished your hunting: Will your story lead to Uproar, Sensation, Education, or Snooze? Any of the first three is satisfactory, although a publication’s goal is always to make a mark. If your story’s potential seems limited to a sleeping-pill function, tell your editor before you spend any more time on it. He may find a way to revitalize it, or he may propose killing it; either way, you will be saving time.
The final word in the formula for thawing a frozen writer is LENS: Lead, End, Nut graf, and Substance. More about these in Chapter Eight.
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