Write Stuff

His Wall Street Journal editors call Barry Newman the dean of A-heds, the elegantly crafted feature stories that for years occupied the middle column of Page One. Now ensconced in a box at the bottom of the page, the A-heds could become a thing of the past, Newman fears, if Rupert Murdoch and his new editors get their way. But not yet.

For Tim Harper’s Craft class this week, the thin, graying, avuncular Newman opened a window into how he puts together these 1,200-word gems, which sometimes take a month to prepare. He writes about 10 a year, which, in these times, may sound like an unaffordable luxury. But when combined with other Journal reporters’ A-heds, Newman and colleagues produce a daily surprise and delight for readers, and the sort of reporting and writing that burnishes the Journal brand for excellence.

Newman has written about everything from grape nuts (hint: no grapes, no nuts) to a business called “Going out of Business” (we’re not making this up) to Moammar Gadhafi’s tent problem in Englewood, N.J. (For the record, his Englewood story was a one-day turnaround, but displays Newman’s trademark humor and punchy writing). One more anecdote of Newman’s resourcefulness, taken from a foreword to a Journal anthology of A-heds, “Floating off the Page”: Thirty-one years ago, banging about the Australian Outback, Newman learned that Australian sheep farmers, to keep dingoes (wild dogs) away from their sheep, had put up a barbed-wire fence longer than the Great Wall of China. A distant New York editor didn’t think the story worth more than $200 in expenses. Undaunted, Newman rented exactly $200 of air time from a local farmer with a small plane and got the color he needed from above.

Here are a few of the many tips Barry shared with Tim’s class:

* Test market your story idea with your colleagues. If they don’t like it, neither will readers.

* Build your story around an observable event or action to provide a narrative thread.

* Establish a sense of place, so that readers understand how the story couldn’t happen anywhere else.

* Keep the mystery alive. Don’t try to tell the reader everything in the first few paragraphs.

* Interview more than one person at a time. There’s nothing like dialogue to speed up your story.

* Use short, punchy sentences.

*Organize your notes into themes or categories. Newman indexes his notebook. Whatever works.

* Omit needless words. Be obsessive-compulsive about it. Compress, compress, compress!

* Be willing to kill your children. OK, he didn’t say that but it’s what he meant. Sometimes you’ve got to throw away your best stuff when it gets in the way.

* If you’re passionate about your subject, you can excite readers. If you’re not, you can’t.

* Do the reporting. Without it, you can’t write with confidence and authority.

“Reduced to its essence, a good English sentence is a statement that an agent (the subject of the sentence) performed an action (the verb) upon something (the object).” — John Ciardi, American poet and writing teacher

“Those of us lucky enough to write in English have no excuse for using anything less than the strongest verbs.”– Jack Hart, “A Writer’s Coach.”

We can’t improve on Ciardi and Hart. But we join them on their call for more sentences that derive their power from a construction of subject, strong active verb and object. You diminish the power of your sentences when you construct them in the passive voice. The reader senses little urgency and abandons your story. The passive voice also encourages the use of unneeded words and forms of the weak verb “to be” — is, are, was, were.

What do we mean by the passive voice? Jack Hart gives this simple example: PASSIVE: The ball was clobbered by the cleanup batter vs. ACTIVE: The cleanup batter clobbered the ball. What usually happens, Hart says, is that the writer takes the original object of the verb and twists it into the subject of the sentence. It’s important to find the passive voice in your writing and ask whether the active voice would work better. Check, too, how often you use a form of the verb “to be” and see if you can rewrite to use an active verb.

The active voice encourages you to find the strongest possible verbs, too. While the use of gerunds and participles (creating nouns and adjectives by adding -ing to verbs) sometimes adds vitality to your writing, their overuse often suffocates strong verbs yearning to be free. (In other words, strong verbs yearn to be free). Here’s an example from a recent edit:

ORIGINAL: That technology was on full display, with the giant screen showing the tug-of-war, broadcasts blaring in two languages, chefs in both cities trying out recipes.

BETTER: The technology was on full display as the giant screen showed the tug of war, broadcasts blared in two languages and chefs in both cities tried out recipes.

OR The technology was on full display: The giant screen showed the tug of war, broadcasts blared in two languages and chefs in both cities tried out recipes.

Here are two more simple examples of how a switch to the active voice can move your sentence faster, eliminate unneeded words and convey action:

ORIGINAL: It was not until around 2005 that the situation improved.

BETTER: The situation improved in 2005.

ORIGINAL: However, his 8 years as mayor has also given Mike Bloomberg ample opportunity to offend various groups of voters in one way or another.

BETTER: Bloomberg’s eight years as mayor gave him ample opportunity to offend voters in one way or another.

So get active and make yourself a better writer.

P.S.  Craft professor Dave Lewis provided a wonderful example of the active/passive issue –  Which would you prefer hearing from your significant other? I love you or You are loved.  Case closed.

Mike Reicher followed up on a tip to the Times’ Metro desk. Eleanor Miller used a cold-call e-mail to pitch the Brooklyn Rail. Emily Johnson walked in the door of the Canarsie Courier and talked to two of their editors.

What really helped them get published, of course, was good old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting.

Mike, who works for the Times’ local blog, went to the historic Harlem building that was losing its top two floors and got in touch with all the players. He didn’t get bogged down in the building’s confusing history or the legal machinations surrounding it. Instead, he stayed focused on the news and the most recent developments, and succinctly summarized what had happened in the past. Result: A print version of his story in the Times, with byline.

Besides her all-out hustle to get the story, we liked the energy of Eleanor’s lead and how her strong description set up the rest of the story:

The actors ran barefoot on a sandy beach and projected their lines over the cries of seagulls. The audience sat in 1,500 white folding chairs on a boardwalk across from a mural of Henry Hudson’s landing on Coney Island.

This was not a typical production of The Tempest.

Here’s how Eleanor pitched her stories to editors:

This Saturday and Sunday, 1,500 audience members are expected to crowd the Coney Island boardwalk to watch a one-of-a-kind theatrical performance. Brave New World Repertory Theatre, a company based in Brooklyn and made up entirely of Brooklyn cast members, will present its rendition of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” in an extraordinary beachfront performance that is free and open to the public. The setting in Coney Island was certainly no accident, and Claire Beckman, the artistic director of Brave New World, willingly draws parallels between “the magic and mystery of Prospero’s island and Coney Island, and the allure of it. We’re sort of drawn to it without knowing why. We can’t let go of the magic of the place.”The play will use both the boardwalk and the beach as a stage. “The sea is a character,” Beckman told the cast at Thursday night’s dress rehearsal. “You have this incredible set.”

Eleanor’s pitch showed that she had done some reporting, had access and could get the story.  We don’t want to pitch stories that fall through.  The main thing Eleanor’s pitch shows is that if we raise our hands and step forward, good things happen. We can’t get published unless we pitch.

Emily, who chose last in the CD lottery and picked Canarsie, asked the Courier editors to give her a call if they ever needed anyone to cover anything. Oh, and she could take photos, too, which they loved. No surprise, then, that the next morning she got a call to cover a civic meeting where she heard residents complain bitterly about getting tickets for double parking. Talk about a classic New York story.

BTW, the editors already have given her another story to work on.

These reporters’ tales of getting published echo so many we’ve heard in the last few years: Work your beat, create opportunities and report, report, report. Check with your Craft professors, writing coaches and the News Service’s Jere Hester.

Here are Jere’s simple but elegant ideas about getting published:

•Go in with a good story — if you’re not sure, some tests: Can you say it in a sentence? Are you excited about the story? Are you breaking new ground? Run it by some friends, trusted colleagues, mentors.

•Do you have art? If you don’t, get some – ASAP. If it’s a photo/video/multimedia story, make sure you have some companion text.

•Is it exclusive? Editors love something no one else has.

•Corollary: Do your research. Check the clips — see if the publication/outlet you’re targeting has tackled the issue before. Other outlets also might have taken a crack. Think about what you need to do to push the story ahead. You don’t want an editor to tell you, “We did that story last week.” That may be the last conversation you have.

•Know the publication/outlet you’re targeting. Don’t pitch a 2,000-word piece on citywide housing policy to a community paper that runs 400-word stories focusing on a certain neighborhood. You might want to consider a 400-word piece on how the new citywide housing policy will affect one neighborhood…

•Be flexible — express a willingness to work with the editor on doing whatever has to be done to get the story out to the world.

•Not sure where to pitch a story? Check with your friendly neighborhood News Service director or the writing coaches.