I love quotes

They have a magical ability to take up space in stories on ridiculous topics on which I myself have nothing interesting or informative to say.

 

And their mystical powers sink promising stories with overuse.

Oh how I wish I was a quote.

 

Mary Pettibone Poole:
"The next best thing to being clever is being able to quote someone who is."

Then, her best:
"To repeat what others have said, requires education; to challenge it, requires brains."

 

Sometimes, I hate quotes. Mainly because our SE is a guy who feels that every thing we cover should have a quote....I have no problem with this. But last Friday's HS FB game with the rain delay makes this almost impossible. I still got in about 600 words, quoteless, with boring play-by play to beat deadline and fill the inch count they had for me. Still need a quote, so I topped it with WONDERFUL WORDS OF WISDOM BY COACH A: "We were glad to get the win."

WOW. Insightful! Provoking! But our damn SE wants a %&$)* quote, wants to make deadline and still wants 600 words, that's the damn quote.

My point being, quotes are great, they can tell a story better than I can, but if I'm not going to be able to add anything useful, why waste everyone's time? To prove I was there?

 

Yeah, but there are some people at smaller papers that don't think they need to have quotes at all in a story. Joe, I agree with you that with the circumstances that you had, you didn't need a quote. But there are some out there that cover an event, have hours before deadline and still write a story without quotes... And that is just plain lazy.

 

the best story isn't always the one you have the best quotes for

this is an important lesson that took me too long time to learn

 

Here, here. Sometimes I find myself relying on quotes as a crutch and I have to kick myself to not be so mentally lazy.

 

you mean a quoteless story vs. a game story that's called in?

 

Six-hundred words of mostly play-by-play. Ugh.
I hate deadline writes too, but I don't think I could get a good sense of a story without talking to coaches/players. I don't necessarily use their quotes, but it helps to fill 600 words with some kind of story instead of what happened on 3rd-and-6 early in the second quarter.

God, do you even have interest in reading what you wrote after it's filed?

 

Quotes, in my opinion, are necessary to any game story or feature. Anyone can write what they see, but bridging the gap between the coaches/players and the readers is what makes a story interesting -- with solid writing, of course. Quotes aren't supposed to be a crutch on which to lean, they're the reactions, the feeling and the legs to a good story.

 

I couldn't even imagine submitting a story without quotes. Hell, in almost every story I write, I get quotes from at least three different people, and only in extenuating circumstances (a.k.a. 12-inch counts, or the like) do I ever dip into two.

But zero? Yikes. I imagine if it couldn't offer anything interesting, but if it's a rainout, we just run a paragraph and move on. At that time, even with a 7 p.m. game called at 9 p.m., we've usually been able to adapt.

 

Every now and then, you don't have time to get quotes. Like, the game ends past deadline.