Storytelling on Deadline
By Christopher Scanlan, The Poynter Institute

Twenty-two years ago, I was the police, fire, library board, and conservation commission reporter at The Milford Citizen, a small daily newspaper in a Connecticut suburb. This was my first newspaper job. I was 22 years old.

One weekend, I was sent to cover a drowning at a park outside town. It was a summer Sunday and the park was crowded with families who had come to escape the heat and frolic in the cool water of the lake.

There was no one in the water when I arrived, except for a Fire Department rowboat moving slowly across the smooth brown surface. Beneath the water, divers searched for the body of a teenage boy who had disappeared.

On the banks, families stood around, talking in hushed tones, all their games and Frisbee throwing halted by the accident. Even the children played quietly in the dirt, as if they too were mindful of the tragedy unfolding before them. Off to one side, by the cluster of police cars and emergency vehicles, the boy's family waited.

It took about an hour for the divers to find the boy on the lake floor. A diver surfaced and signaled to the men in the boat and then, suddenly, the boy's head and shoulders broke through the water.

I don't remember many details from that day, but the image of that dead boy is as clear as if I were still standing on the bank watching the rescuers carry his body onto the grassy shore. He was naked except for the long, sodden blue jeans he wore swimming. His chest was muscular and hairless and deathly white. He appeared to be sleeping. I scribbled observations in my notepad.

The boy's mother, a middle-aged woman who had waited, slack-jawed, chain-smoking, leaned on the hood of a police car now and beat a tattoo in the dust with her feet, an angry, futile rhythm.

I followed the rescue procession out of the park.

Back in the empty newsroom, I struggled for several hours to write a story for the next day's paper. This was in the days before word processors, and my desk sat beside a black Associated Press ticker. I was full of the experience, the images, the feelings, but I sat at my typewriter unable to get them onto the page.

I wrote lead after lead. I tried to describe the bitter staccato the boy's mother beat in the ground. Nothing satisfied me, and I ripped the abortive attempts out of the machine. The pile of crumpled copy paper grew in the wastebasket at my feet.

Eventually, I gave up. I surrendered to the wire service standard that clattered incessantly over that machine next to me. I don't have the clip, but I'm sure it came out something like this: "A 17-year-old Milford youth drowned yesterday at Lake..."

I've never forgotten that experience because there was a story to tell that day and I didn't know how to tell it. I didn't have the tools.

Ten years later, two of us at The Providence Journal shared an assignment to write a front-page daily news feature. It had to be on the news, it had to be 20 inches long, and it had to be done by 8 p.m. We soon gave our new job a name: the "heart attack beat."

At the time, it seemed like the perfect name for a punishing assignment, but when I look back on the highlights of two decades in journalism, along with the lengthy takeouts and multi-part series that consumed weeks, months, and even years of my life, I keep coming back to a handful of stories I wrote during that year.

They are stories that haunt me to this day, because I think they embody the essence of the storyteller's craft: They convey important truths about what it means to be alive, and also because I know I did what at the time I thought was impossible-I reported and wrote them in a single day.

Learning to write well with the clock ticking may be the most important challenge that today's journalists face.

Unfortunately, in too many newsrooms, storytelling has become the exclusive province of the feature or project writer who is given space and time denied to other writers. Good writers, those who care about the craft and want to get better at it, often chafe at the restrictions of daily deadlines.

They don't have enough time, they say, to gather the material they need-the telling quotes, the revealing detail, the senses of people, place, time, and drama-to write a story rather than an article.

Getting enough narrative information and being able to focus, organize, draft, and revise it into a story, all in the space of a working day, has to be one of the toughest high-wire acts of the news business.

But those are the kinds of stories I want to read in my paper. They are the stories I want to read aloud to my wife and daughters and clip and save for myself, stories that have the immediacy of life.

I've come to understand that what made the difference between the frustrations of my first newspaper job and the success, if not ease, that I enjoyed writing deadline news features a decade later, were a number of tools and strategies for reporting and writing the news. Some emerged in the crucible that is the deadline experience. Others came from insightful reporters, editors, writing coaches, and teachers, either through the good fortune of personal contacts in Providence, at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies and the St. Petersburg Times, and the Washington bureau of Knight-Ridder Newspapers.

Stories in the News

Within minutes, a photographer and I were on our way. "From Jon to Lani, the Gift of Life," my 800-word account of the coming together of two very different teenagers, appeared on the front page the next day.

Newspapers are full of stories waiting to be told. Police briefs, classified ads, obituaries, the last two paragraphs of a city council brief; all may hold the promise of a dramatic story. Mine the paper, as Steve Lovelady of The Philadelphia Inquirer has been preaching for years.

The newspaper is just one fountain of ideas. Traditionally, the story was the "news," the event or development considered significant and worthy of attention. The challenge for today's journalists is to go beyond bureaucracy, beyond meetings, and to write stories that reveal the "joys and costs of being human," as Joel Rawson described it to his reporters.

• Examine how the "news" affects people's lives: a burglary, a bankruptcy, marriage, death, accidents. "The point is to stress the importance of getting true stories in the paper," says Jack Hart, writing coach at the Portland Oregonian. "Human dramas that go beyond the reports we usually run."

• Find the extraordinary in the ordinary stuff of life: graduations, reunions, burials, buying a car, putting Mom in a nursing home, or the day Dad comes to live with his children.

• Change your point of view. Not your opinion, but rather the spot from which you see the story. Write the council story through the eyes of the Asian-American who asks for better police protection in his neighborhood. Tell the story of the foiled suicide attempt through the cop who talked the jumper down.

"At the bottom of the hill in front of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Pollard started digging. Leaves covered the grass...When the bucket came up with its first scoop of dirt, Metzler, the cemetery superintendent, walked over and looked at it.

"That's nice soil," Metzler said.

"I'd like to save a little of it," Pollard said. "The machine made some tracks in the grass over here and I'd like to sort of fill them in and get some good grass growing there. I'd like to have everything, you know, nice."

Report for Story
We don't write with words, writing coach Don Murray says. We write with specific, accurate information. When Joel Rawson assigned Berkley Hudson and me to the daily news feature beat at The Providence Journal, he challenged us to bring back the sights and sounds of our city and state, not just who, what, when, where, and why, but how.
How did it look?
What sounds echoed?
What scents lingered in the air?
Why did people care?

• Get out of the office. Storytellers aren't tied to their desks. They are out in the streets. They're the reporters who show up before the news conference and hang around after it's over, the ones who interview the victim two weeks after the shooting. They know that stories don't end after the arrest or the election.

"You can't win the deadline writing contest unless you are where the story is," Concord Monitor editor Mike Pride noted when the ASNE judges gave the top deadline writing award to Colin Nickerson of The Boston Globe for his Gulf War dispatches in 1992.

• Look for revealing details that put people on the page. "In a good story," says David Finkel of The Washington Post, "a paranoid schizophrenic doesn't just hear imaginary voices, he hears them say, `Go kill a policeman,' and `You can't tell Aretha Franklin how to sing a song.' "

• Use the five senses in your reporting and a few others: sense of place, sense of people, sense of time, sense of drama. As a rookie reporter, I failed to adequately report the story of that teenager's drowning. Instead of standing there as a passive observer, I should have roamed the park, interviewing, eavesdropping. Approaching the family could have netted important details about the missing boy.

• Write while you're reporting. Listen for quotes, find details, uncover information that you know will be in the story. Reporting my story about the girl whose leg was cut off by an Amtrak train, I interviewed her parents. I asked her father what he did for a living. Engineer, he said. Then when he said his daughter should have escaped injury, I asked him to explain. I knew I was getting an expert's opinion that I could drop right into the story.

Find a Focus

• Don't wait until you're back at your desk to figure out what your story is about. Find your focus in the field, award-winning journalist and author Richard Ben Cramer advises, so you can search for the details, scenes, quotes, that support it. The deadline storyteller must be a radar screen, forever monitoring for information that is the heart of the story.

• Good writers know that a story should leave a single, dominant impression. On deadline, finding a focus quickly is even more crucial.

What's the news?
What's the point?

Although by now I had my focus, rescue by an unlikely savior, I still didn't have a lead until I answered those two questions:

Jon Tesseo is 17, the kind of boy parents look at and say, "Why can't you be like that?" Clean-cut, yearbook photographer, a Boy Scout nine merit badges from Eagle. Just the kind of kid Lani Reynolds couldn't stand.

On Saturday morning, he helped save her life.

Plan on the fly

Writers are always looking for a new way to tell their story, to stretch the traditional forms, to experiment. Writing the lead often helps writers devise their plan of attack. Effective leads "shine a flashlight into the story," as John McPhee of The New Yorker puts it. It is the first step of a journey. Just as important, if not more, is the last step, the ending. Create your own form.

David Zucchino of The Philadelphia Inquirer says his deadline stories are "totally determined by the facts on hand, the amount of time I have, and the space…The form is determined by the situation."

• Before you begin writing, make a list of the elements you know you want to include in your story. Number them in order of importance. Structure your story accordingly.

• Look for pivotal moments that make story beginnings dramatic and irresistible:
  
  When things change;
  
  When things will never be the same;
  
  When things begin to fall apart.

• "Think `short' from the beginning," advises Roy Peter Clark, co-author with Don Fry of Coaching Writers: The Essential Guide for Editors and Reporters. It's a suggestion echoed in The Elements of Style, Strunk & White's indispensable guide: "You raise a pup tent from one sort of vision, a cathedral from another." Staying faithful to an 800-word length will help you jettison irrelevant information and avoid reporting detours that might be interesting but that will consume valuable time.

Conceive and re-conceive the story in your head.

Rehearse your lead on the way back to the office.

Give yourself three minutes to write a five-word plan to structure the story.

Lower Your Standards

• Write like hell, Clark says. Wait for the adrenaline to kick in.

• Put your notes aside before you start to write. "Notes are like Velcro," says Jane Harrigan of the University of New Hampshire, author of The Editorial Eye. "As you try to skim them, they ensnare you, and pretty soon you can't see the story for the details." Her advice: Repeat over and over, "The story is not in my notes. The story is in my head."

• Follow the advice Gene Roberts, legendary editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and now managing editor of The New York Times, got from his first newspaper editor, a blind man named Henry Belk. "Make me see."

• Lower your standards. Of course, you and your editor must apply rigorous standards-of accuracy and clarity, among others-but ignoring the voice that says, "This stinks" is the first step to producing copy on deadline in time for revision. The wisest advice on the subject of writer's block comes from poet William Stafford:

I believe that the so-called "writer's block" is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance...One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It's easy to write. You just shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing.

With 35 year's experience at deadline writing, AP correspondent Saul Pett said he stopped spending so much time on leads as he used to. "We make a mistake when we're younger. We feel compelled to hit a home run in the very first sentence. So we spend a lot of time staring at the typewriter. I'll settle for a quiet single, or even a long foul, anything that gets me started."

Rewrite For Readers

The writing process isn't a straight line. Often the writer circles back to re-report, re-focus, re-organize. Good writers are never content. They're always trying to find better details, a sharper focus, a beginning that captivates, an ending that leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

• Role play the reader. Step back and pretend you're reading your story for the first time. Does the lead make you want to keep reading? Does it take you too long to learn what the story is about and why it's important? If not, are you intrigued enough to keep reading anyway? What questions do you have about the story? Are they answered in the order you would logically ask them?
• Shoot for a draft and a half. Write your story once through and then go back to polish, to re-order, to refine. If your time is limited, I'd argue that it's best spent on your ending. That's the last thing readers will experience. Make it memorable. The story of Jon and Lani ended this way:

"He didn't get sick because of the gore," Gencaralla said yesterday. "An ambulance attendant had told him he didn't think the girl would make it. She'd lost a lot of blood. Jon said, `I should have made a tourniquet.' What made him sick was the thought he didn't do enough."

Historian Will Durant once observed, "Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river."

I know now that when I covered that tragic drowning 20 years ago, my biggest mistake was focusing on the river, or in that case, the lake, where rescuers were searching for the victim. The real story was on the banks, where his family waited.