Beginnings and Endings
Finding the right hook to keep the reader
Kickers: Why they matter more than leads
Where to begin? The lead/lede.
* Grab the read. Don't let go. Set the table for the article. Give some taste of the 5 Ws -- who, what, where, when and why. Think of it as a movie trailer. A taste.
* Lede is not just first sentence (although that is very important). It is first paragraphs where you establish your scene/your premise/what you plan to do.
* Action verbs. Grabbed. Ran. Jumped. WATCH OUT FOR SIT !
* Try to avoid "to be" construction.
* Present vs. past tense.
* What makes the story unique? Most memorable moment? Start there. Perhaps.
* What is the news? What is the story? Remember, they are different.
Direct vs. Delayed. Straight vs. Feature. "Just the facts, ma'am" vs. "Let me tell you a story."
Dare-You-Not-To-Read Lede: Creative. Pithy. Usually short. Can't stop reading. Encapsulates story.
Gary Robinson died hungry. -- classic Edna Buchanan lede from Miami Herald about guy shot in line at a fast-food restaurant.
Snow, followed by small boys on sleds. -- New York World‑Telegram in a weather story.
Descriptive Lede: Paints a scene. Length can vary. Common in feature stories.
First, the eyes: They are large and blue, a light, opaque blue, the color of a robin's egg. And if, on a sunny spring day, you look straight into these eyes -- eyes that cannot look back at you -- the sharp, April lights turns them pale, like the thin blue of a high, cloudless sky. -- "A Boy of Unusual Vision", Alice Steinbach, Baltimore Sun
DARDENNE PRAIRIE, Mo. --Megan Meier was buried in the polka-dot dress she planned to wear for her 14th birthday. She had handed out the invitations to her party the day she died. Her eighth-grade classmates attended her funeral, instead, heads bowed and hands clasped as her casket was loaded into the hearse.
At the time, Megan's suicide was considered a private tragedy in a quiet suburb tucked between strip malls a half-hour up the interstate from St. Louis. Concerned neighbors embraced her stunned family, and a collective grief seemed to envelop the look-alike houses on Waterford Crystal Drive.
A year passed before the truth began coming out.
-- "A Teen's Online 'Friend' Proved False, And Cyber-Vigilantes Are Avenging Her", Tamara Jones, Washington Post
The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band.
The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept. He was virtually catatonic, she remembered, his eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth, locked away in some unfathomable private torment. He would not speak at all for the longest time, not until the nurse sank down beside him and held his hand. It was only then that the patient began to open up, and what he said was that he didn't want any sedation, that he didn't deserve a respite from pain, that he wanted to feel it all, and then to die.
-- "Fatal Distraction", Gene Weingarten, Washington Post
Jack Bowman was up most of the night. At 6 a.m., when it was clear he couldn't fall back asleep, he got out of bed and walked down the hall toward the kitchen. His wife Runelle already had the coffee on. He said good morning to her. He turned on the radio. He turned on the TV, too, keeping the sound low.
At 7 a.m., the news came on, and Bowman watched intently. The pictures were of the scene at Florida State Prison. The prison itself, a long flat shadow, was in the background. In the foreground was a steady stream of cars, and in the cars were people holding signs. One of the signs read, "Burn Bundy burn." Another read, "Roast in peace." Another read, "Chi-O, Chi-O, it's off to Hell I go."
At 7:18, the phone rang. It was the Florida Attorney General's Office in Tallahassee. "Mr. Bowman, this is Paul Freeman," the caller said. "This is to let you know that the sentence has been carried out.
The execution occurred at 7:07, and he was pronounced dead at 7:16."
In St. Petersburg, Jack Bowman hung up. A sensation of relief spread through him. It was a vague feeling - "flat" is a word he would use to describe it later - but relief nonetheless. Theodore Bundy had died. At last.
-- "11 years later, the phone call finally came," St. Petersburg Times, David Finkel
Where to end? Kicking the kicker.
* Consider the circle. Come back to the lede. Reusing the imagery of the lede to settle your end.
* Important. Heartfelt. Make it resonate. What do you want the reader to remember? Emotion?
* Consider using your best stuff last.
* Natural ending -- chronological.
* End with a quote. A little trite but safe if in need of a lifeline.
There was another moment, years ago, when Clavin's mother and father knew that the operation had not helped, that their son was probably never going to see. "Well," said the father, trying to comfort the mother, "we'll do what we have to do and Calvin will be fine."
He is. And so are they.
-- "A Boy of Unusual Vision", Alice Steinbach, Baltimore Sun
Josh Evans exists now only as a closed FBI file. In a MySpace survey, he said he wore size 13 1/2 shoes, preferred cappuccino to coffee, didn't smoke or take drugs and had never shoplifted. He sometimes swore. He liked girls with long brown hair and said weight didn't matter. The final question asked what things in his past he regretted. The answer was typed in capital letters, a shout from a nonexistent boy in a virtual world.
"NONE," he said.
-- "A Teen's Online 'Friend' Proved False, And Cyber-Vigilantes Are Avenging Her", Tamara Jones, Washington Post
Miles and Carol Harrison deserve another child, Balfour explains measuredly. They would be wonderful parents.
This is the woman you either like or don't like, right away. She is brassy and strong-willed and, depending on your viewpoint, refreshingly open or abrasively forward. Above all, she is decisive.
Balfour says she's made up her mind. If Miles and Carol Harrison are denied another adoption, if they exhaust all their options and are still without a baby, she will offer to carry one for them, as a gift.
-- "Fatal Distraction", Gene Weingarten, Washington Post
The TV went off. In the quiet, Jack Bowman regained his composure and then headed outside. He wanted the day to go by easily and the night to go easily, too. He wanted to sleep soundly. He wanted to awaken and sense that Ted Bundy was already beginning to be old news.
He wanted the vengeful signs of strangers to be thrown in the trash and their firecrackers put away. He wanted to finally get to the point where at last he could think about everything that had happened.
Tuesday, for a short time, he tried.
Tell me your feelings about the execution, someone said to him.
"I wanted him punished," Jack Bowman said. "This was not hard for me."
Tell me about Margaret, he was asked.
He began to cry. He shut his eyes.
"I don't think I can."
-- "11 years later, the phone call finally came," St. Petersburg Times, David Finkel
Back at the cemetery, Floyd stands over JJ Tate's grave. A temporary stone marker is covered in red hand-written messages. Floyd picks up a marker and adds his own.
He climbs back into his truck and drives the cemetery's narrow road. He wants to find Hawk. He missed the funeral because he had to work. But he had visited the grave several times.
He scans the cemetery. No luck. Floyd calls a friend for help. His face freezes. He leans over the steering wheel. Hawk is not here. He is buried in the nearby town of Steele. Floyd feels awful.
"We were paying our respects to someone, " he says. "Just not him."
There has been so much death recently. Too much.
Floyd, like others here, is lost.
-- 'People are wondering, who's next?', Todd C. Frankel, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Time again to take the year-end quiz By Randall Roberts / December 28, 2005
30. Identify the sentence St. Louis Post-Dispatch scribe Todd C. Frankel did not write to begin an article in 2005:
A. "The BTK killer has an infectious laugh."
B. "The pope had sore feet."
C. "Rick Bussey pointed to his steak fajita."
D. "C.C. Baird dealt in dogs."
94. Identify the sentence that Post-Dispatch writer Todd C. Frankel did not pen to begin an article (Part 2):
A. The Mad Russian was drunk and ready to sleep it off.
B. You might say Red Bull is good for plants.
C. Joe Pulitzer was rumored to have a peg leg.
D. Tennessee Williams was at a low.
Stalking the feature story
How to avoid wasting time chasing bad ideas
Stalking. How to spot them. Hunt them. Find them.
* Carry a notebook. Ideas come and go. Send yourself email or text.
* Be patient. Think of yourself as being on a stakeout. Many wasted hours, except for that one crucial moment.
* Wait. Wait. Wait. Arrive early. Stay late.
* Just because you were there does not make it worthy.
* Just because you saw it does not make it worthy.
* Action seen is better than action reconstructed. That said, you can't be everywhere at once.
Avoid bad ideas. The frequent mistakes. The easy pratfalls.
* Don't dream the story too early. Report it a little. See if your initial instincts are born out. Be open-minded. Major problem can develop if you try cramming story into your original mold. Be flexible.
* But do pay attention to your initial reactions, visceral response to story. Can be a touchstone when you're wading knee-deep through reporting. Keeps your eye on the prize.
* Focus. Focus. Limit.
* Zoom in on personalities, people. Better than ideas or places. People behind the creations.
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Anne Hull's address @ 2008 Elijah Lovejoy Convocation, excerpt.
Eudora Welty, who is the great Southern short story writer, was asked once to describe the sensibilities behind her stories. And while she’s not a journalist, she gave a model example, I think, of what good journalism is, and that is: “It is not my job to judge, but merely to pull the curtain back to reveal this hidden world behind it.”
And that is what I try to do with the stories I write.
When I first started out at the Post, I was going to write about the influx of migrant labor in the South, and I went to Arkansas to write about the number of Hispanics who had come to work in the poultry processing plants there. But I wanted to look at this phenomenon from the viewpoint of a white, rural, working-class person who was absolutely in awe of this blitzkrieg. They were giving their jobs over, they were kind of losing their stake in this community they felt very familiar with.
So I ended up going to this town, to DeQueen, Arkansas, and everyone said, “They’re taking over our town.” It’s kind of the common anxiety. So how do you find out if someone’s taking over your town?
You do the old-fashioned thing that any reporter would do; you go to the property-appraisers office and you ask the clerk to see the deed books for the last 10 years. And so you’re sitting in an office for probably six hours going through these heavy, leather-bound deed books, and you could see the story of the new South unfolding in those pages: Anglo surnames transferring over to Hispanic surnames. And, again, right there, was the story of the South. It only ends up being one line in the story, but it offers one brick in the building you’re trying to build.
You need a human to carry the narrative, so I needed a white guy who was in fear of losing his job. So I hung around the factory gates of the chicken plants and watched these streams of workers coming out—greasy, feathers literally coming from their boots. That’s how I met a worker named Danny, and I asked to come into his life and sit with him and report on this. This is the kind of reporting that’s not Q&A and shoving a microphone in someone’s face. It’s asking for permission to come into their lives and explain it to the reader.
What does that look like? It means sitting at a guy’s dining room table until midnight drinking coffee while he smokes and talking with him. It means being in his house at five in the morning when his alarm goes off and he marches off to the factory to pulverize chicken bones, which is what he did for seven dollars an hour. I tried to get at the sentiment of, what does it feel like to be on the receiving end of this massive immigration? And it turned out to be a portrait of his anxieties. But he didn’t have rancor toward the newcomers, he just was in awe of their ability to work—to outwork him.
I came back to the Post and I wrote this story and it published. And one of the grizzled old Washington veterans came up to me and said, “Well, that’s great, but when are you going to get up to theHill and cover real journalism?”
And I said, “I thought I was.”
... There is no replacement for that sort of reporting. And there’s a lot of James Agees still around doing this, but they’re becoming fewer and fewer, replaced by this caffeinated society of bloggers and Twitterers who are filing dispatches from a TMobile spot at Starbucks.
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When we’re working with storytellers, we ask questions like, “What is the story in one sentence? Or even two words—what are you going from and what are you going to?”
In all forms of writing, you have to have themes. But in writing you can have many more themes. For the Moth, you really do need to have one theme for one story. Your story about going skydiving for your 50th birthday could be any of five stories, depending on what is the deeper story of your life.
The important thing in storytelling is to choose, so you have an organizing principle for your piece and you can give the audience a rope to hang onto.
-- Lea Thau, executive dir of The Moth, not-for-profit storytelling group
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