Learn about storycraft

WholeStory.com

The storycraft place

training ... teaching ... coaching… consulting 

Online:  Writer coaching; editor coaching; product critique; workshops; writer groups; story consultation; concept brainstorming.

On-site: Custom-created workshops on all aspects of writer/editor training, story development, series planning, multimedia packaging.

Free services: special-topic online learning groups (by special arrangement); web chats; estimates on complex stories or projects.

Contact us for fee schedules and information about classes and groups coming up.

Class and Workshop Sampler:  

• Story or project focus
• Alternative story forms
• Principles of nano-narrative
• Whole-story thinking
• Whole-storying with multimedia and page design
• Writing for multimedia
  
• Fundamentals of structure
• Advanced topics in editing, structure and storycraft
  
• Topics in narrative structure and storytelling
• Coaching for flexibility and change
  
• Powerful newswriting (for beginning journalists)
• Powerful newswriting (for corporate/government communicators)

Step One: Admit you are a Journalist ...

I am still friends with people from my old, dusty newspaper days, as well as from my middle newspaper days. I still lunch with friends from my most recent newspaper days, story-coaching for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, a Tribune Newspaper, meaning (I am sure you know), the guys that are trying to figure out what to do with their various stumbling newspaper properties, and as they do, they have to unload many fine editors and reporters and photojournalists.

I loved my job as a Story Coach at the Sun-Sentinel. We did some wonderful things, like a huge series on AIDS orphans in Haiti, which got a lot of buzz, but not a Pulitzer, but that's OK, because it was (as my one-time mentor Bob Maynard used to say) "the most fun you can have with your clothes on..." Actually, mine was a contract-consulting position, not a real Tribune-Hearty-Handshake-When-We-Dump-You job, but in June 2008, my supervisor (nice person, still friends) called me in and said:

"You will have noticed how grim things are around here ... people losing jobs right and left. I am afraid I won't be able to justify, you know, training, in light of all this ..."

Things there were indeed grim, as they were elsewhere in the newspaper world. I said: I am done. Been doing this, i.e., newspapers, story-coaching, writing for newspapers that plop on your driveway in the morning, for 25 years. More than a lifetime. Finito.

I decided to go back to school to get an MFA in Creative Writing. This so I could teach creative writing—my lifelong dream, my pre-journalism dream, a dream deferred because of a career that kind of chose me one day when I wasn't looking. You know, the journalism bug. It bites you.

So, now that I am almost two years out of the newsroom, with a full semester (just ended) of taking three classes and teaching two (Freshman Rhetoric & Composition), I can offer other recovering (or soon to be) journalists some sage advice. Or, at least, tell them what worked for me.

So, all of you thinking about slipping out the back before your pensions disappear, before the ink dries (oops—they no longer use real ink), before they pull the handshakes you so richly deserve after 15, 20, 25 or more years laboring, for love, in American newsrooms…

Here is my best advice for how to go back to the Real World at the advanced age of ... (Insert Your Profile Data)

#1. Learn Math.

For four months after I was severed from the Sentinel, I sat on the brown leather coach in my living room and taught myself Math. Started with fractions. Went up to decimals (or the other way around, can't recall). Went all the way up through algebra.

You should learn math because, to get into any graduate school, any discipline, you have to take the Graduate Record Exam, the "GRE," a glorified SAT (like the one your kid takes to get into UF), a thing that has study books (Borders, Amazon) that walk you through Math, showing you how it works from the ground up. After about two months, once you sort of get it that

Phyllis

 A Eulogy September 15, 2001 

 My mother crossed over on the 9th of September at age 87, in her sleep, in her own bed, in her own beloved house. 

 It was, particularly in light  of the unspeakable awfulness that visited our country two days later, a blissful way to leave this earth. But as grateful as I am for her longevity, as joyful as I am about the richness of the life she lived, as thankful as I am for the ease of her crossing, there is another part of me, a very large part, that cannot fathom a world without Phyllis Hogan there to help make sense of it.

When the calamity came to New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, there was part of me that thought, "I am so glad that my mother isn't here to see this." But there was another part, a very large part, that desperately needed to hear what she had to say.

It was not in Phyllis Hogan's vocabulary, it was not in the remotest corner of her being, to say, “Let’s grease the Taliban!” 

I think she would have said, "It makes me think of the last lines of Dover Beach." And then she would have quoted the last lines of Matthew Arnold's vision of a world in chaos:

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.


Of course, it’s also possible that she would have sat there in her red sweater, shrugged her shoulders, and said, as she said so many times when something was  truly mystifying:  “I don't know, you know.”

But I do believe she would have reached for Mathew Arnold, or someone of like wisdom, because my mother loved poetry. My mother felt about poetry the way  many people feel about religion. She went there for solace, for meaning. She quoted lines of poetry out of the blue that somehow always perfectly befitted the occasion at hand.  There's a story my father often told about the time he was courting her. They went for a walk in Berkeley, and Phyllis started reciting "The Highwayman,"  by Alfred Noyse. It has the refrain, "And the Highwayman came riding, riding, riding up to the old inn door. "

There are many, many verses to that poem. And each time she finished a stanza and uttered the refrain, Bill Hogan said, "That was lovely." But she kept going. She recited every single verse  as they traipsed around North Berkeley. And at one point, my father thought, "My god - I don't think there's anything to do here but to marry this woman."

One night in the last few months of her life, I was talking to my mother on the phone. There was a pause. I guess I wasn't sure if we were ending the conversation, so I said, “Well, here we are on a darkling plain …”

And she said, in that tiny sound that had become her voice those last few months: “Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.” 
My family was dealt a double blow this week, and handed the double task, of grieving, most deeply, for the victims of the unspeakable awfulness, and for our country, my God, for our country—at the same time that we were grieving, most deeply, for Phyllis. Through the unspeakableness I found myself wondering what Phyllis Hogan would have said, how she would have comforted us, in our grief at losing her. I think what she would say is:  "Honey, you know that passage from Emerson. "And then she would have quoted from Emerson's essay  “The Oversoul:” 

"The heart in thee is the heart of all. Not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly, an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and truly its tide is One."

Because my mother was a true Transcendentalist, an Emersonian, a seeker. She read about and believed in the wisdom of all religions and spiritual practices. She dabbled in Buddhism and Hinduism and borrowed from them for her life journey. She went through an I Ching stage --  I now wear her I Ching charms. She loved the ancient deep of Judaism. She saw the great wisdom that is reachable through the timeless stories of Christianity. And yes, saw the beauty of Islam. I treasure the gold-framed Islamic prayer she gave me years ago, an artifact from her own childhood, that ends with the line,  “The Peace of Allah be with you.” 

 When my mother and father were married in 1948 in London, their favorite city, they received telegrams from their friends back home wishing them well, and there is one in particular, from an army friend of my father's, that I always loved. It said:  "Only bachelor left. Stop. You did great. Stop. Find me another Phyllis. Stop."

      You know what? There isn't another Phyllis. There never was, and never will be. 
       Many many years ago a boyfriend of mine had a difficult loss, not of a person, but of a beloved guitar, that was stolen by a hitchhiker had picked up in those days when people trusted the world enough to pick up hitch hikers. My friend was devastated.  I was devastated for him.  My mother said, "Honey, I know you feel bad, but in times like this, you should remember what Emerson said --  ‘Nothing is lost in the Universe.’”  You know what, Mom? I believe that. And I thank you for that. You are in the universe, and not lost. But I will still miss you terribly.  

Fearing the Future

A young journalist sent an email asking, "Should we be afraid of the future? Where is it all heading?" This is what I told her: 

On Being a Teacher

(Excerpt from a talk to the 2007 graduates of the Bay Area Multicultural Media Academy, San Francisco.)

I told a friend that I was teaching a class of high school students this summer.

            She said:  “Don’t they make you feel old?”

I had to stop for a minute to think. This is what I thought:

When I wrote my first news story more than 25 years ago, our BAMMA editor in chief Jesse Garnier was still a little boy.

     When I got my first newspaper job, our wonderful student editors, Walter, Donna, Zoneil, were not yet born.

 When I taught my first newswriting class, our director Cristina Azocar, now a nationally known diversity educator, was a fresh-faced college kid.

 And now you come—15, 16, 17 years old --  a different generation inhabiting a  world far different than any of us could have imagined, with technology that has changed at a faster rate in the last 10 years than it did in centuries and millennia before, going back to the time of humankind’s invention of the wheel.

Welcome to a rich and lofty heritage. We are handing you – hope we have given you these last two weeks – the core values that have defined journalism forever, and will continue to, no matter what technology brings:

            Fairness, accuracy, integrity, context, a heart for deep local reporting on communities of diverse color and class; a hand for always reaching to bridge what my mentor Bob Maynard called the “fault lines” of  race, class, gender, geography, generation and ideology.

 Do you make me feel old?

 No.

 When you’re a teacher, and you see your students, no matter which generation,  produce something of quality, create something of beauty (and creating is, I believe, the reason we were put here on this earth) – when I see one of you create,  a little bit of me somehow gets to live on forever.

And that is pretty cool.

Her first date

By Mariecar Mendoza 

The Desert Sun 

I have a confession to make: I had my very first date Sunday.

I was a little nervous and squeamish up front, but after the first I was on a roll.

In fact, I had a total of eight dates by the end of the night - and they were all extremely sweet.

As a newcomer to the desert, I attended the Riverside County Fair & National Date Festival in Indio on Sunday with a mission to understand what all the hype is over the Coachella Valley's signature fruit.

Described as "exotic," "divine" and "very healthy for you," dates look like oversized raisins and have a texture that reminds me of the prunes my grandparents used to make me eat when I was child.

But I wasn't totally turned off.

With the encouragement of several date experts and date lovers at the festival, I treated my tongue to an ultra-sugary experience.

When Don Smith of the Thermal-based growers Oasis Date Gardens saw me eat a whole date in my mouth and make a "Whoa this is sweet" face, he advised: "Think of it as tasting wine ... don't take a big bite."

With those words of wisdom, I nibbled on several dates from Deglet Noor to Zahidi and Thoory. My tastebuds enjoyed a rollercoaster ride through sweet, mushy, creamy, meaty - even nutty. At the end of the day, I was still longing for more - just as a good first date should end.

Lacey Fosburgh, 1943-1993

A Teacher Thanks her Teacher

Lacey Fosburgh 1943-1993

Dear Lacey: 

I thought of you the other day (think of you often) when a reporter was driving me nuts with her incessant self-doubt.

I told her: “This is silly. You absolutely have what it takes to pull this off. You just have to step out of your own way.”

What I wanted to say was: “Get over yourself! Get over yourself or get out of here! Your problem is never going to be talent –it’s always going to be psychology!”

That’s what you said to me – remember? – maybe 20 years ago.

I never forgot it.

It’s taken me that many years to see how right you were.

I imagine my reporter didn’t get the full force of the message from what I told her. She might have, had I been more like you.

I never got a chance to tell you (did I? can’t remember): You changed my life, and I am ever so grateful.

I’ll never forget the first day you walked into our newsroom. Were you tall? Or did you just seem so, with your unremitting elegance, regal carriage, perfect blond-streaked hair, straight nose, those blue-blood cheek bones, and clothes, whether jeans and T-shirt or silk and tweed, that made you look like you just stepped off of Fifth Avenue.  

You stood out so in our newsroom, a teetering downtown cavern with added on rooms connected by sloping floors covered in cracked linoleum and down-to-the nub carpet.

“Are you going to see the … writing coach?”  people asked each other.

You could taste the skepticism. What it really was, I see now, was fear.

(Maybe she’ll tell me I’m not as good as I think I am…)   

Back then, nobody knew what a writing coach was. We just knew you’d been asked to come and help with the writing.  Oh, like we need help from a  …what is it?

Do you remember that first staff discussion about quote, unquote good writing (as you  used to say)?

Among the stories you’d chosen to talk about was one of mine. It was a story about a premie baby who’d just spent a year in the hospital and was now getting ready to go home.  

You read the first few grafs aloud.

“Is that a nice picture?” you asked.

People nodded.

Yes, nice picture.

“Very nice writing,” you said.

My stomach buckled. Something about the way you said very nice.

“Is it a complete picture?” you asked.

People mumbled, looked down at the story, reread the top hoping to see some kind of right answer appear.

Nothing.

You said:  “Here we have a very nice story about a tiny baby in this amazing hospital with all this technology, a story about – what? The triumph of medicine and technology in keeping this tiny little thing alive…? And then what…?”

Silence.

You said: “Let me ask you this – how much did it cost to keep this little baby going with all these fancy machines? How much per day? How much over the course of the year? Who paid? Who made the decision that that amount of money, whatever it was, was worth it?”

Then someone else said, “So maybe instead of a story about the triumph of medicine, it should have been a story about … weighing the cost of one life, and how you do that?”

“Exactly,” you said. “And which one is a better story?”

The weighing-the-cost story, obviously.

My very nice story had no mention of cost, no mention of which decisions were made and how in weighing those costs. The most basic information needed to make the story complete.  It was a donut-hole story—you’re writing around it with a lot of nice phrases and just the right splash of emotion (“very nice writing”) but there is this gaping hole, the most basic element needed to make the story stick.

I don’t remember much else about the session that day, but I do remember this:

At that moment, a window opened on my understanding of what it is we do, don’t do, should do, as journalists. Of how easily we tend to dig in, in defensive mode, when we get to a certain level of “good-ness,” afraid to push beyond—because if we do, we’ll find out how much there is we don’t yet know. Of how writing isn’t about words and sentences at all, but rather, about hard information, about how this bit connected to that one or another creates meaning, structure, the things that bore into the brain cells and make people sit up and go, Oh wow. About how the words and the sentences are just the tools we use to express those deeper things.

You came into my life one day and started asking me questions like:

What is the informational core of the story?

The emotional core?

The intellectual?

What’s the sociological thicket it crawls around in?

What’s your favorite word in the story? Why?

What’s keeping you from writing it the way you see it?

These are questions I use all the time now with reporters I work with.

Oh – that’s the other thing:

The very last time I saw you—after nine wonderful years of your mentoring, teaching and friendship—you were in the hospital. In a coma. David said I could talk to you and that you would hear me. I was pregnant with my second son and wanted you to know.

I said, “Hi Lace – guess what? I’m going to have another little boy. I thought you’d be happy to know.” I thought I saw you faintly smile.

It wasn’t until the next year, a year after you were gone, that I really began teaching, that teaching became my life.

So I just wanted you to know that.

I ask reporters all the time now about their favorite word, about the thicket their story crawls in, and sometimes I tell them to get over themselves. Well, maybe not exactly that way, yet. But I’m working on it.   

And did I say thank you?

(Note: Photo of Lacey Fosburgh is from the jacket of her latest novel, India Gate, (c) 1991 by Neil Reichline) 

Orphans and Compassion

(Notes on a South Florida Sun-Sentinel series.)

© 2006 Mike Stocker

The topic of Caribbean AIDS Orphans is either a reporter’s dream or a compassion-fatigue cesspool sure to make people run for the hills. That was the main hurdle when the hashing out of the story began. Tim, the reporter, had notebooks full of rich (but potentially brain-numbing) material. He and his editor, Cyndi, wanted to engage people, not make them glaze over more than they already had simply by seeing the words AIDS and Orphans. I was invited to be their story coach, sort of cheering section and safety net-combined, there to push them to try new things but bounce them back if they started going over a cliff.

            Here’s what happened, and what altered my view (and theirs) about challenges writers face with compassion-fatigue subjects:

Still in the field in Haiti, Tim started sending us e-mail dispatches of raw interviews with kids he met. The interviews were filled with a kind of rough-hewn poetry – kids trying to describe life at its most desperate. It was clear to us all, with Tim’s first dispatch, that the kids’ voices made the (literal) heart of the story.

In editing down the interviews, we listened for the place where the kids talked from their gut rather than from self-consciousness. We made a hard and fast rule: The stories would be told solely from the point of view of the kids—no adults allowed—and where possible, in their own voices. The result, to my mind (and to the minds of numerous awards judges), Tim’s orphan stories were fresh, emotional, engaging, and full of lessons for us as journalists – the big one being: Don’t just look for the quote. Listen for the voice.

            Our inspiration was the beautiful book by Anna Deavere Smith, Talk To Me,  (which I think every journalist should read), in which the actor/ playwright goes on search for the “authentic voice” in American culture and public discourse. She holds that people (anyone, politicians, your uncle Charlie) start to speak authentically when they move past the scripted, the learned, the self-conscious, and tap into where they really live.

 “Our modern American problem is not lack of communication,” Smith says in Talk to Me. “The problem is a disconnect between the heart of a voice and the purpose that the voice is meant to serve. The public voice repeats the status quo. And most voices that we hear have been adjusted by the time they get to us. We rely so much on mass communication, and mass communication controls much of what gets to is. It’s very hard to hear an original voice. We are very far from the personal, the one-to-one, the human touch.”

            She could be describing newspaper writing, with its fly-paper reliance on quoting Very Important Officials about the state of things.

            Tim’s orphans don’t do that. They have original voice.

Favorites:

Fritz Junior, 15, street child :

"My mother is in the Dominican Republic. ...

My father died of AIDS. My uncle was the one who told me.

            His hair was straight and fine, and he had a lot of sores all over his body.

            He would talk to me about it, but then one day he just laid in bed and died.

            My uncle is now in New York. So now I live in the street. ...

            I wash cars, clean windows and make dice to sell out of dog bones.

            Sometimes I get sick, a fever, a headache.

            And sometimes I have cramps when it's too cold in the street.

            They abuse me, the older kids, the men.

            They burn you with matches when you sleep …”

15-year-old with HIV

            "I don't go to school. I used to go. I made it to fifth grade.

            I like history because it has a lot of good stories.

            It tells you what happened to our country before. ...

            It tells you about our heroes who used to fight for independence.

            My mother died in September 2004.

            She was sick for a long time. ...

            My father died in October 2004, right after my mother. ...

            People like to die a lot around here.

            It's a nice area, there's not a lot of noise.

            But whenever people die, people come out of their houses and look. When I get up in the morning, I brush my teeth. I cook, and then I drink my medicine.

            Then I go to the fields and look for wood so my grandmother can cook supper.

            Then I roam around the village …”

Odeline Victor, oldest daughter in family whose father died of AIDS

            "When I was in third grade I wanted to be a doctor.

            And now, when I see that I'm 19 and not even finished with my grade school, I see that's an impossible dream.

            It would cost too much money and take too much time.

            I would like to try to sing and just look for any other work or training I can get.

            Maybe computers, maybe sewing.

            I would like to sing for God, and sing about nature and all the things that inspire me.

            I want to work, though, because the only way to achieve in life is through working.

            So how can I achieve anything if I cannot find work? My mother doesn't want me to work as a maid or take any odd jobs because she wants me to learn something special.

            When I wake up in the morning I pray, and during the day I have these physics books that my brother found.

            It's about electricity.

            So I work in it, do the exercises because I don't have anything else to do.

            On Wednesdays, I go to church and sing.

            I used to play volleyball, but I don't play volleyball anymore. I think it's the economic situation of my family, it's just depressing.

            I often feel depressed. I don't feel like doing anything. It's not necessarily that my friends look at me badly because my father died, but I feel I missed something in my life.

            Instead of progressing, I regress in so many ways.

            But I feel like I'm not giving up yet.

            I have goals. I want to achieve something.

            I don't just know how yet.

            I used to be close to my father.

            He showed me to how to start a car.

            He was a good friend of mine."

Wisdom of the Tree

(This wonderful newspaper story, by Diane Tennant of the Virginian-Pilot, is one sentence long.)

"Know that a tree was planted for a soldier who died in World War I giving his all; that his name lived on for years after, because a little plaque by the tree gave it out; that even after people stopped remembering who James Lynch was and why he gave his life on Aug. 28, 1917, that his tree kept growing in Portsmouth City Park; that his selfless gift “for God and country” has been accepted as a quiet challenge of remembrance by the tree; and that what it gives of itself is a vow that life cannot and will not be stopped but must go on and on and on:

   Acorns." 

 

Why do I love this story so? 

I love this little story because of what it does in just 112 words. I call it “the shortest narrative in the world.” It tells a whole story, one that is rich, affecting,  powerful. The skill behind it just boggles, more, somehow, than would that of an equally affecting story of 11,112 words.

I wanted to know about Diane’s tree encounter. Here is what she said.

Me: “Did you conceive of the story it before you encountered the tree? Or did the encounter with the tree inspire the piece?”

Her: “Here’s the way it happened. (Colleague) Lon Wagner and I entertain ourselves with challenges: Who can write the shortest story, a story without quotes, a story that’s only dialogue, a story about an inanimate object? The tree story came about because I was looking for an inanimate object. I was actually looking for a rock by the water, romanticizing to myself that it would be a rock where lovers met, kids swam and fishermen fished. Well, there are no big rocks in Hampton Roads because it’s all coastal plain. But while I was strolling the side of a river looking for a rock, I found the tree.”

Q: How or why did you want to do it in one-sentence? A dare? Something you personally wanted to accomplish?  

A: I did not sit down intending to write a one-sentence story. Although the shortest-story challenge was out there, I was only going for an inanimate object. When I sat down at my computer, I started to write it like an ordinary story, but I didn’t get much further than a few words. It wasn’t working. It was dull, and not just your ordinary dull – it was stupendously boring. So I mentally regrouped, and what popped into my mind was Shel Silverstein’s  The Giving Tree  http://www.shelsilverstein.com/html/books.asp   I’m a tree-hugger myself (just ask my husband about my reaction to trimming the oak in our front yard) and I have always thought that trees are incredibly generous while putting up with a whole lot of abuse from humans. And I started to think about the tree in that light. And what I wanted to do was tell people about how generous trees are, so I started it with a little lecture, sort of a “Know this, you people” thing. Once I found the first word, it was simple to structure it as a single sentence.

Q:  Was it a special occasion—Memorial Day, dedication of a park, some anniversary, etc. --  or just a day in the life of James Lynch's tree?

A:  There was no special occasion. It was a nice day, I needed to get out of the office, find a rock. I thought I might find a rock at Portsmouth City Park, but I found the tree instead.

Q: In conceiving the piece, were you aware of the various threads and themes you rope in, or was it one of those inspired things that make the rest of us want to go jump off a bridge?

A: I knew that the main subject was the tree. And that the tree had to keep the “action” going in the sentence. So even though I had all this information to get in about the soldier (World War I serviceman, died during the war, name, date of death, the location of the tree, the fact that a plaque was there), each clause had to have the tree in it. That was probably the hardest part – figuring out what the tree was going to do in each clause: give out his name, grow in the park, accept the quiet challenge of remembrance, make a vow and drop acorns.

Q: How much thought (versus writing time) went into the story?

A: Considerably more time went into thinking than actual writing. I had thought long and hard about what kind of inanimate object I could write about, about how I could make such an object emotionally appealing. You know, I could write about the pink highlighter sitting here on the desk in front of me (Hi-Liter, ask for it by name! Made in Mexico!). But unless there’s some emotional connection with the reader, it wouldn’t be very interesting.

But I had to also set limits for myself. I didn’t want to quote anybody or have a human voice intrude on my inanimate object. It wouldn’t be a challenge to write about somebody talking about an object. So, no human voices. My object had to be the main character. My object had to have interaction with humans, or it wouldn’t be appealing to human readers. And I gave the tree a point of view as well – the tree makes a pledge and gives of itself. And trees do that. They don’t imbue it with the emotional baggage that humans carry, but each tree on Earth is programmed to reproduce itself and go on and on and on.

Q: And in the end, you won your challenge …

A:  I was pleased to have knocked off two challenges with one story: Inanimate object and shortest story. Lon and I threw out these challenges to entertain ourselves and to keep our story ideas fresh. I love a challenge. It’s just my nature. Tell me it can’t be done and I’ll try to do it. Rebel against authority. Newspapers don’t publish one-sentence narratives? Try this on for size.

Magic numbers

                     A reporter on a piece about slow rescue response time in his city:

“ I’ve got a whole bunch of numbers, lots of them — just not sure which to leave in and which to take out.”

     Forget about the bunch of numbers. What’s the most interesting one — or one key one?

               “How ‘bout, the average time it takes emergency vehicles to get to the outskirts of town, where oldest residents live, 7 minutes, 11 seconds…”

Is that good, or bad? Right now it just sits in a vacuum.

“Here’s another thing: The amount of time the human brain can go without oxygen before you die is… 6 minutes.”

Woe. Hold on. Those two numbers placed together – the 7 minutes, 11 seconds it takes to reach the oldest folks, the 6 minutes the brain can keep going without oxygen, makes a whole story. It’s the lynchpin of the whole thing. (Lynchpin: (n.) 1. a pin inserted through the edge of an axletree to keep the wheel on; 2. something that holds the various elements of a complicated structure together.)

“Maybe it’s a story about numbers,” he says.

Maybe it is. What do you got?

As he talked, he picked out key raw numbers that could be used to kick off the beginning to a new section in the story:

33,705. The number of calls the Pompano Beach Fire RescueDepartment received in the past two years ….

891. How many times in the past two years a rescue truck blasted its sirens through traffic to reach The Preserves at Palm Aire, a large retirement home at the southern edge of the city …

29. The number of years since the last fire station was built in Pompano Beach … etc.

In fact, it was a story about numbers. Or, rather, the reporter’s story concept exploited the device of numbers as a storytelling tool.

Of course, the copy desk had to be alerted to his use of raw numbers heading each section, lest an eagle-eyed slot guy say, “Hey – we don’t do raw numbers….” thus wrecking the concept.

In the end, the use of the raw numbers to kick off each section served to underline the fact of the original lynchpin numbers—6 minutes for the brain to live without oxygen, 7 minutes 11 seconds to get to the city’s oldest residents.

Smart graphics people saw the storytelling potential in a timeline, beginning with 0, going on to 6 minutes, and ending at 7 minutes, 11 seconds.

The result was a beautiful front-page hit that ended up sparking a city investigation and winning the reporter a first-place state award for city beat reporting.

And it’s because he took the time to think. And to conceive. And to take a risk.   

See the page layout for the story.

Read whole story here.

Hex nuts & Scarlett O'Hara

(The story behind the Whole Story) 

It started with a new swing set.

My husband and son were checking off the list of parts: corner fittings ... top bar… ladder leg… hex nuts…

Check?

Check.

They laid the pieces on the grass and  were ready to assemble.

Soon the nuts and bars and legs gave way to something greater than the sum of the parts. In fact, the parts were now invisible. What mattered was my kid's flying feet licking the air in front of him.

That’s when it hit me:  Writing is the only assembly-required activity that doesn't come with a list of parts required.

When we teach writing, we usually don't talk architecture. We talk style polish, transitions, ledes, nut grafs, etc., important stuff, to be sure, but --  then what?

The story doesn’t soar.                        

The writer used all the hex nuts and decorative decals but didn't end up with a swing set.  

One day I took the inventory-of-the-parts idea to a troublesome college writing class.

"Don't write your stories today," I said.  "Instead, just for fun, type up your notes in simple sentences. We're going to inventory the parts before assembling your stories. Sort of like building a swing set."

They thought I was nuts.

But what emerged over the following weeks was a way of thinking and talking about writing that allowed them to see beyond the morass of information in their notebooks to the integral parts of that information; to how those parts could work together to form the dynamic whole.

I call it the Whole Story .

Whole storying turns on the premise that all information in the universe falls into one of four categories:

Data, event, issue, or idea.

What makes a good piece of writing good is the tension from the interplay  (and interdependence) of  those informational parts.

When one or more parts is missing (check your local newspaper to see how often) the story is a groaner, maybe a nice little groaner with a zippy lede and few catchy phrases, but still a groaner.  

When all the parts are there, when the writer understands how they relate to one another and how they work together (and then uses the writing to reflect that in a clear way),  The piece has internal structural integrity.

Try it: inventory the parts:

Data? That's the stuff that is: facts, statistics, immutable evidence that helps pin the story down, like the screws holding the bars of the swing set in place.

Events? Those are the things that  happen: anecdotes, strains of narrative, the stuff that moves and gives the story life, like the swing and teeter-totter units that hang from the bars by the rope.

Issues? That's what is happening: currents running through events, giving them form and context—yes, like the side legs and cross bars of the swing set.  

Idea? That's the larger thing the interplay of the parts adds up to – the driving force behind the story, the thing that connects connects with a reader.

The idea is the kid swinging, wind in the face, legs pumping higher, in a word ( and most ideas can be expressed in one word)—fun.

At this point, someone usually furrows their brow and says,  "What's the difference between an issue and an idea, anyhow ?”

Instead of saying, "Well, night and day," I tell them about the time Margaret Mitchell ran into a fancy New York publisher when she was still writing Gone With The Wind.

"So, Little Lady, what's your Civil War book about?" the publisher said.  

Mitchell looked him in the eye: "It's about people who have gumption and people who don't."              

There you have it.

Nowhere in the book does Mitchell write, "This is a story about people who have gumption and people who don't. Scarlett O'Hara had it, Ashley Wilkes didn't. Mammy had it...."

The issues in the book are many—slavery, the cotton economy and the trials of post-war Reconstruction, for starters.  But people keep reading Gone With The Wind not because they're jazzed about the burning issues of the Civil War period.

They continue because that fundamental idea – what it takes to survive, i.e. gumption—speaks to them. It's what everything in the book adds up to. It's the beacon that guided the author throughout.

Issues come and go.

Fundamental ideas are timeless.

In the years I've been using the Whole Story,  I've learned a lot about writing and writers. First, there are thousands of stories out there that are good, or even very good, but still missing that magical something.  Chances are, what's missing is the idea.

At this point, the brow-furrowing types  say, "All these years you've been telling me to use concretes and now you're telling me to use concepts."

The answer to that is no, no, no. The idea of the story isn't a concept. It's the focus, the magnet that helps the writer pull out the very best details, the ones that belong in the story, not the other 10,000 that don’t.

The idea is the invisible force that lives in quotes, in detail, in language and image, the things that make a story soar.

The other thing I've learned is that most writers want desperately to create a thing of beauty, to write their stories onto A1. When they warm up to the idea of the idea, a whole new realm of storytelling  opens before them. The writers themselves change. They have a chance to touch the sky.

On being a teacher

(Excerpt from a talk to the 2007 graduates of the Bay Area Multicultural Media Academy, San Francisco.)

I told a friend that I was teaching a class of high school students this summer.

            She said:  “Don’t they make you feel old?”

I had to stop for a minute to think. This is what I thought:

When I wrote my first news story more than 25 years ago, our BAMMA editor in chief Jesse Garnier was still a little boy.

     When I got my first newspaper job, our wonderful student editors, Walter, Donna, Zoneil, were not yet born.

 When I taught my first newswriting class, our director Cristina Azocar, now a nationally known diversity educator, was a fresh-faced college kid.

 And now you come—15, 16, 17 years old --  a different generation inhabiting a  world far different than any of us could have imagined, with technology that has changed at a faster rate in the last 10 years than it did in centuries and millennia before, going back to the time of humankind’s invention of the wheel.

Welcome to a rich and lofty heritage. We are handing you – hope we have given you these last two weeks – the core values that have defined journalism forever, and will continue to, no matter what technology brings:

            Fairness, accuracy, integrity, context, a heart for deep local reporting on communities of diverse color and class; a hand for always reaching to bridge what my mentor Bob Maynard called the “fault lines” of  race, class, gender, geography, generation and ideology.

 Do you make me feel old?

 No.

 When you’re a teacher, and you see your students, no matter which generation,  produce something of quality, create something of beauty (and creating is, I believe, the reason we were put here on this earth) – when I see one of you create,  a little bit of me somehow gets to live on forever.

And that is pretty cool.

900-word Crash

(E-mail from one of my favorite writers.) 

Here is the centerpiece story for discussion today at Poynter—8,200 words! What do I have to learn from that? I get 900 words tops! There's a real disconnect between our paper and the best in the industry …   

E-mail back:  Pitting one paper's 4,000 words with another’s 900 words tops is certain death. There’s nothing wrong with a beautifully fashioned 900 words. Or even 500. You might remember that William Allen White's Pulitzer Prize winning piece  (1922, Emporia Gazette) was three grafs and 345 words.  Length does not mean power. Length does not mean skill. It doesn’t insure that someone will read what you write.  Power (and skill) is in hearing the rhythms, nailing the words, seeing the structure. It’s choosing which idea to boil down to its fiber-rattling essence;  knowing which words do that best (and in what order), knowing which 90 percent of your notebook riches to dump, ignore, excise; finding the image that sets the whole thing in motion. That is what makes a story. No matter what paper, how many words, or what topic.  Sorry if I can't commiserate with your angst here. But I think framing your possibilities the way you have above is just a setup for more heartache. I have seen you soar and I don’t want to watch you crash.

Unstuck

I'm kind of stuck. I’m doing an enterprise piece about how a child here has to be 5 by September 15 or they can't start schoo. I have string on a guy with a kid who missed the deadline by two days. How should I approach the story? Are there specific questions readers would want to know?

          Response:

What is the core of the story?

            Questions for you to answer: What does it mean that there's a law about the age of a kid starting kindergarten? Who cares? Who's in favor of it? Who’s against it? Why is it even an issue: What does the guy GET who wants to sneak his kid under the two-day deadline? What does a parent NOT GET if their kid doesn’t meet the deadline?

            In other words, because of these rules, who wins, who loses and who cares?

Is there a GATEWAY element to the story --  i.e., if my kid can't start kindergarten this year at age 5, then he faces a lifetime of being left behind (in the parent view)? Is that a valid concern? Who says? Why did the legislature make the rule in the first place?

            My suggestion would be to answer the above questions, simply, concretely. What three or so points emerge from that exercise? Then to look thru notes and see if you have people, quotes, anecdotes, to support/ flesh out the points. Then write a nut graf, and a couple of possible ledes. And then send for more discussion. My two cents. It's all about finding focus.

Nautilus

Consider the nautilus shell:

Writes biologist D’Arcy Thompson in On Growth and Form. “Each successive stage of growth, starting from the origin, remains as an integral and unchanging portion of the growing structure.”

I thought about the nautilus when I had coffee with a smart young reporter who was describing a Veteran’s Day story spinning in his head.

“I have all these interviews with World War II vets, but I don’t want it to be a, you know, here are these World War II vets talking about their experiences. I think I want it to be a story about how we tell stories, the meaning of storytelling in passing on information from one generation to the next.”

"Very cool,” I said. “Do you think there’s anything there about memory and how the brain works? Like, some guy who can’t remember where he left his hat, but he can remember exactly what happened and who said what more than half a century ago?”

“Yeah—,” he said. “… how certain experiences are imprinted on our brain, how the stories become part of us …”

This reporter – he can’t be a minute over 28—is a nautilus.

In just two years, he has (as D’Arcy Thompson would say) “been conformed by successive and continuous increments.” Each new chamber in his artistic growth holds a proportionately larger mastery of craft than the chambers before it.

Each time he tries something new – and he does this with almost every story he encounters – he pushes beyond what he’s done before, forming a new chamber, a new level of mastery, of skill.

In the theoretical world, if a nautilus were to continue growing years and years past its natural life, its shell would cover the whole beach, then acres, then counties, then continents. That’s because of the mathematical pattern of growth of the nautilus (and many other spirals in nature).

“… the chambers will be similarly shaped but larger,” writes Trudi Garland in Fascinating Fibonaccis: Mystery and Magic in Numbers. “Each time this happens, the living nautilus moves into new, familiar, but roomier quarters, where it lives comfortably until the process needs to be repeated.”

Nautilus growth (and, I believe, artistic growth) follows the so-called “Fibonacci sequence,” a series of numbers that grows ever larger as each new number is the sum of the previous two.

The first 12 numbers in the Fibonacci sequence:

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 …

(1+1=2 … 1+2=3 … 3+2=5 … 5+3=8, etc.)

Because of their cumulative nature, Fibonacci numbers become giants in fairly short order.

… 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946 …

One second you’re looking at 1+1=2, the next second you’re at 10946 + 6765 = 17711.

For hundreds of years, students of science and mathematics have noted that the sequence mirrors growth patterns in nature. As a teacher, I have often felt the sequence also reflects how we learn. That is, how we learn when we’re fully engaged in a given domain, like, say, writing and storycraft.                 

Some reporters, like my friend with the World War II vets, are nautiluses, programmed to take what they’ve done and learned into the next chamber of growth, then the next, and the next and the next.

Others are clams.

Nice clams. Competent clams. Maybe even big clams.

But they will never push beyond the limits their shells have imposed on them. Why? Personality? Nurture? Nature? Who knows, really? It’s just how it is, the way of the sea.

Monet's Glasses

Some time ago a Monet exhibit came to Washington. The review captivated me. The paintings in the exhibit, the reviewer explained, came from the final years of the artist’s life. They were muddy. At least as Monets go.

A text panel explained that by that time in his life, Monet had lost much of his sight to cataracts. The paintings from that period reflected his defective vision. (As Monet noted in a letter to a friend, “…my poor eyesight makes me see everything in a complete fog.”)    

The paintings by themselves, the reviewer went on to say, left only questions, like, what the heck are these things?

But then came the story.

There, in a glass case, exhibit-center, was a pair of Monet’s specially-tinted spectacles, through which he was able to see at least well enough (with one eye) to paint beyond the time that nature had allotted him.  

The inclusion of that one detail, Monet’s glasses, transformed the exhibit from a showing of lesser paintings by a great artist to an affecting story—a whole story-- about vision and the artist’s will to create.

In that one detail, the exhibit creators moved the story from a single-dimension Who-What construct:

Monet in his last years painted a lot of muddy pictures

… to a dynamic three-dimensional Who-What-Why construct:

A nearly-blind Monet in his last years struggled to create, wouldn’t give up, hated the glasses, but needed them to connect the boundless vision of his mind with the limited vision of his eyes.

Sometimes, when it’s clear something is missing from a reporter’s story, the piece that unlocks it all, I mention the exhibit, and ask, “So, where are Monet’s glasses?”

More often than not, there is a slight startle, then a blink of the eyes.

Clear eyes.