Internal writing conflict... UPDATED!

I'll weigh in this weekend, if that suits. Good thread, and many thanks to everyone who's chipped in so far.

 

I'm surprised someone said they liked the lead. I thought that was one of the weaker areas. Just kinda boring, I thought. Everyone who's ever been in a gym knows what a guy who's about to bench looks like.

Also, as the same person said, I'm unhappy with the ending. I may meet up with the kid again at the fitness center and get some more details about his lifting to help the end, as was suggested. That sounds like a good idea -- more of a sports connection, which is important for reasons I'll describe in a moment.

My biggest problem, though, was the middle, the bulk of the story. I just don't feel like I did it justice. I feel like it could have been so much better, but I don't know how so.

Also, I feel like this is barely a sports story. Ninety percent of it is about the kid's incredible birth, with only a tangental connection to sports. I feel like this would make a better feature-section story than sports, but it was assigned me, so I did the best I could tying into sports.

That's part of where my problem with the lead came in. I feel like I had to start with the weight lifting scene, or else you'd get all the way to the end of the story (if I told it in linear fashion) before you saw any connection to sports.

I think I'd like it better if I could start at the beginning, when he was conceived, or during delivery, at least. But the problem with that, along with a weak connection to sports, is that you get the climax of the story near the top, and have to keep reading to get to a kind of 'Oh, by the way, he's also a great weight lifter' sports connection, which I don't think would help the story.

Anyway, I'm curious what the many better writers here than me have to say about this. I believe this story is running Monday or Tuesday.

 

Mr Shackleford,

I don't think you're leading with your strongest material.

I look back on the piece and think what stays with me. Not him doing a bench press. Two plates, three, four, it all looks pretty much the same. Used to be fat, now not. And that's where we are six grafs in.

This sticks with me: He was born dead. Father almost had to bury son and mother. A minister and sermons.

It may be a case of a little too much of the mechanics of the bench at the top. Or perhaps it would be better to start somewhere else with something else (father's sermon, rise ye faithful and then the weight hoisted. the bench in around graf 4, 5 or 6). I'm not prescribing one over the other. Or either. But your instinct about your lede is probably sound.

YHS, etc

 

Rusty,

Thanks so much for sharing your struggles with this story. It's a tough thing to see a piece through when you're not sure of yourself, and your tenacity does you proud.

I know you're on deadline, so I'll keep this brief. I'm going to agree with FotF. Even though you're rendering it in scene, the lede's a little flat as it stands. That you have birth, death and rebirth to work with - double powerful stuff - the born again son of a Born Again preacher seems a natural place to start. And would drive you to a better finish, too.

Right now you've got no ending - in part because you're lede promotes no echoes lower down in the piece.

As FotF suggests, if you began in a sermon, you could then finish in one. Or, if you begin with the "born again son" idea, you can finish with a flourish on the same note. Always find your endings in your beginnings.

The body of the piece is fine. Watch for overwriting, though, and make a last pass as your own best editor before you file to take out gratuitous or unnecessary modifiers. Clean. Clear. Rhythmic.

You're doing great. I'm around this weekend for further questions, but you're almost there. Keep at it. Good luck.

 

While I agree with the fact that I'm not leading with my best info, I'm concernced that changing the lead to the religious side of the story (birth, sermons, etc.) renders it non-sports. That's part of why I chose to lead it the way I did -- so it's clear from the start why it's in sports. Otherwise, I fear, you could end up halfway or more through the story before there's any connection to sports. As it is, the meat of the story is the birth, etc. -- sports is only tangentally connected to that.

I know it's easy to say 'Just write the best story,' but in a case like this, is that really the best idea?

 

Mr Shackleford,

It's in the sports section, I presume. That would flag it as sports for the reader. You don't have to start out your piece by defending its placement in the section. You have to start out by defying the reader to put it down and stop reading. Your strongest, most evocative stuff up front, even if it seems like it's not sports. In fact, I think that readers are just as likely to turn and move on from a story in the sports section if it reads like 99 percent of the stuff. Options, compromises: Maybe you can allude to sports in IDing the father, maybe in placing the son in the flock listening, something like that. But hear me--for too long it's just the story of a boy and his bench. Go out of the box.

YHS, etc

 

It doesn't have to be all one thing or all the other, RS. The trick - such as it is - is to have your cake and eat it, too. To lay out a lede that makes it clear this is a sports story, but a sports story enriched by the breadth and depth of human experience. If you were to imitate, say, Gary Smith, you might wind up with a very simple first sentence like:

This is the story of an athlete who was born and died and was born again.

At which point, in 16 words, you've telegraphed the entirety of the story and let the reader know that it's about sports and life and death and rebirth. Every sentence to follow would resonate to those references, and would give you license to take the reader anywhere you wanted to go.

 

You see, this is why this board, hell this entire site, kicks so much ass.

Thanks to all, especially jgmacg and friend of the friendless, for helping me with this. I'm working on re-working it right now, and I'll post what I've got, hopefully later this afternoon.

 

Happy to help you honor the work, RS. I'm in and out the rest of the day, but will check in when I can. Rumble, young man, rumble.

 

Borrowing from a theme, I present the re-birth of my story. Thanks for all who have helped make it what it is.

New critiques definitely welcomed. My only concern is that it may be too preachy.
___________

BRIGHTON – The father’s sermon is reaching a crescendo now.

“Have you ever been to the place where it hits you so fast and so hard, it’s like all of the sudden you can’t even remember how to pray?” he says.

His voice is rising and falling like the tides, seemingly several octaves higher than normal. One moment it’s difficult to hear it’s so quiet, the next it’s almost frighteningly loud.

“(The devil) kept coming at me and saying, ‘What are you going to do now? Where’s all your fancy preaching now?’ And I started to agree with him. Yeah, where is it now? What am I going to do now? He was destroying me.”

It may sound all fire-and-brimstone, the type of repent now or take a first-class ticket straight to the bottom of hell kind of sermon popular during John Milton’s time.

But viewing it that way would be missing the point entirely. It’s a sermon about life, about giving thanks. The crux of the story begins with the moment of birth. And then death. And then a miraculous re-birth.

But unlike every other sermon that begins in that exact way, that features those exact topics, this one has a personal twist to it.

It begins with a baby boy that was never supposed to be, born to a mother who was never supposed to walk and to a minister father who nearly had to bury them both.

It is, as so many sermons are, a story of giving thanks for the son – more than just the one you're thinking of.

N N N
At the bottom of the stairs, down a long, musty hall reeking of evaporated sweat, Caleb Prettyman lays on a black weight-lifting bench. He grips the coarse steel bar inches above his eyes and, with a brief, guttural grunt, lifts the heavy bar from its stand and into the air.

Down to his chest and back up he lifts the bar, then quickly, in one fluid motion, returns it to its rack.

He stands, his face red with a mist of sweat beginning to blanket his brow.

“I remember when I couldn’t do that,” he says of lifting 275 pounds. He could lift much more – 400 pounds or more – if he so desired.

Caleb Prettyman, 17 and 180 pounds, does not look like a champion weight lifter. He has a round, friendly face with eyes so blue his corneas could be made of coral. He has the wide shoulders and broad chest of a weight lifter, but on this day he wears a gray t-shirt and gym shorts – hardly the muscle-flaunting attire of a typical gym rat.

But Caleb Prettyman is far from typical. A little less than two years ago, Prettyman more resembled the Pillsbury Dough Boy than the finely sculpted block of granite with 13 percent body fat he has become. He weighed 230 pounds and could bench press only 185. He was, like so many American children these days, overweight and out of shape.

Caleb’s father, Bob Prettyman, stands nearby and smiles.

“I tell Caleb all the time: I lift 220 pounds every time I get off the couch.”

Bob Prettyman looks like a typical suburban dad. He’s short and stocky, with receding black hair and the same friendly face, albeit worn by the years, shared by his son.

He is a traveling minister, having given sermons the world over. In private conversation, his voice is calm and caring. When he’s in front of a mass, preaching the virtues of Jesus Christ and his religion, he develops a certain gusto not befitting a man who seems quiet, almost shy, in normal conversation.

Bob’s favorite sermon, one he proudly affirms that he’s given on three continents, is about Caleb. He calls it “Thank You Is More Than A Word.” It is a sermon about giving thanks for what you have on Earth, for what God has done and will do for you.

Few people are more qualified to give such a sermon than Bob Prettyman. Seventeen years ago, his only son was born dead. Now he’s alive and well, physically strong and intellectually gifted, with no lasting effects of a birth, and death, that almost killed him.

Bob Prettyman is eternally thankful.

N N N
The sermon begins with a lecture on revelation – about how you have to experience a revelation before you can really begin to give thanks to God.

Bob Prettyman’s revelation, actually the entire Prettyman family’s revelation, began many years ago.

Marilyn Prettyman, nee Crull, was 23 when a car accident left her paralyzed from the neck down. Years of physical therapy and deep prayer with her husband of five years eventually brought back much of her lost movement. But one thing the therapy and, seemingly the prayer, could not do was return Marilyn’s lost ability to bear children.

Doctors told her it was an impossibility. Years of married life sans children seemed to confirm it.

Bob and Marilyn Prettyman thus moved on with life, eventually convincing themselves that all was for the best anyway – that a child would only get in the way.

But late in the spring of 1989, a trip to the doctor’s office confirmed what doctors had said would never, could never happen – Marilyn was three months pregnant.

It came as a shock. All those years without having children, the fact that the couple had given up on ever conceiving – and now it was all happening.

The next six months went as smoothly as any pregnancy could. Marilyn never experienced any morning sickness, the checkups all confirmed a healthy child and Marilyn, who following her accident was prone to suddenly falling down, went the entire pregnancy without so much as a slip. Life for the Prettymans had become a dream-come-true.

“It was an absolutely perfect pregnancy and we were having the time of our lives with it,” Bob Prettyman said.

On Nov. 16, Bob took Marilyn to the hospital to deliver the impossible child, the one they had prayed for but given up on ever having. It was going to be the most joyous day in their lives.

And it was. It just wasn’t easy.

For all the ease of the pregnancy up to the point of birth, the number of events that swerved against the Prettymans during the birthing process was staggering.

For starters, in the days leading up to giving birth, Marilyn Prettyman’s kidney stopped working, and she began having convulsions. A doctor referred the Prettymans to Jersey Community Hospital, where Marilyn was to give birth via emergency Caesarian Section.

While in the hospital, though, she developed toxemia and pre-eclampsia, or elevated blood pressure during delivery, which is potentially fatal for both mother and baby. Also, her legs had swelled to the point that the skin was breaking open and bleeding.

Despite it all, though, Caleb Joshua Prettyman was born on Nov. 17, 1989 at 3;47 a.m.

And for all intents and purposes, he died on Nov. 17 1989 at 3:47 a.m.

Caleb was born with a zero on the Apgar score, a method used to assess a newborn’s health that ranks a baby from zero, or life threatening, to 10, healthy. Babies who score below three are considered critical cases.

“If your definition of death is pulseless and not breathing, then that would be an appropriate definition (for Caleb) at that time,” said Dr. David Harmon, a family physician who was on-call at Jersey Community Hospital that night and assisted in Caleb’s birth.

The critical newborn, who was limp with dark blue-tinted skin, was whisked away to another room immediately after birth, where he was intubated and doctors went to work bringing him to life.

In the meantime, Bob and Marilyn were unsure of exactly what was going on. Marilyn, in her surgical haze, was not sure if, or when, the baby had been extracted from her or why she heard no crying. Bob, in the waiting room, was told the Caesarian Section surgery would take an hour. After three hours, he still had no idea what was going on.

“All the sudden, the nurses come busting out of the delivery room and go running down the hall and they’re getting these big machines and they’re running back up the hall again,” Bob Prettyman says during his sermon about Caleb’s birth.

“I’m running beside the nurses saying ‘What’s the matter?’ And they’re just saying ‘You’ll have to wait for the doctor.’”

Eventually, Caleb began breathing and a heartbeat was detected. A helicopter was called, and Caleb was airlifted to St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

Bob, who feared both for the life of his wife and newborn son, who was still far from out of the woods, was told he should get to Children’s Hospital to care for the baby.

It is an hour-and-a-half drive down U.S. Route 67 from Jerseyville into St. Louis and to Children’s Hospital, just to the west of downtown and just to the east of the city’s famed Forest Park.

Bob Prettyman, driving his red Plymouth Reliant Wagon, didn’t know what to do, what to expect as he made the drive. His mind wandered to his family. His wife might not survive childbirth. The newborn baby boy they had always wanted but had been told they could never have had finally arrived, and he might not survive either.

“Have you ever been to the place where it hits you so fast and so hard, it’s like all of the sudden you can’t even remember how to pray?” Bob Prettyman says in his sermon. “I found that the devil was in my car, and he was beating my brains in. … He kept coming at me and saying, ‘What are you going to do now? Where’s all your fancy preaching now?’ And I started to agree with him. Yeah, where is it now? What am I going to do now? He was destroying me.”

It was then, Bob says, that a miracle occurred.

“The presence of God just filled the car,” he says in his sermon. “And he told me, ‘Begin to thank me now, because I’ve already done what needs to be done. It is finished.’”

Bob gave his thanks, and that’s when it came to him: Thank you is more than a word.

By the time he arrived at Children’s Hospital, Caleb was surrounded by machines with monitors and needles in his head, and there were still questions about how well he would recover – he had, after all, gone some time without oxygen right after birth.

Back in Jerseyville, Marilyn continued her recovery. She says that during the birthing process, she had a sense of calm about her that was unexpected given the circumstances.

“I had prayed for Caleb, well, for the baby, in the months leading up to the birth,” she said. “Then when I went in for (the C-Section), I was just at total peace. … And the scriptures that I had prayed over Caleb would go across in my mind like a ticker tape, just like at a bank. I could feel my body doing something, but then those scriptures would go across my mind and I could feel a total relaxation.”

N N N
The sermon ends with a flourish. Bob puts on a shirt with a large ‘C’ on the chest, plus a cape, and, no phone booth necessary, becomes…

“I AM COVENANT MAN,” he screams. “When sickness and disease comes calling, Covenant Man jumps into action.

“When it’s dark and scary and doom and gloom is all around, my covenant lifts my eyes to heaven and my heart cries out, ‘I want to thank you, Jesus. I want to thank you for who you are, and I want to thank you for what you’ve done.’”

Six days after arriving at Children’s Hospital, Bob picked up Marilyn in Jerseyville and the two of them drove to St. Louis. The first time Marilyn saw her baby boy was the day the family took Caleb home.

Even then, though, Caleb still wasn’t out of the woods entirely. Bob forgot to strap the newborn’s baby seat into the seat belt buckle in the car, and at the first stop, the baby and his seat tumbled over into the floor.

Seventeen years later, Caleb is fine, and the Prettymans give all the credit to God for keeping their son alive. So does his doctor.

“I believe calling it a miracle is appropriate,” said Dr. David Harmon. “Certainly (Caleb’s) success, and his performance since his birth, is miraculous. Some of these kids have lifelong learning disabilities, but Caleb has been a star student and a star citizen for quite some time.”

Dr. Harmon certainly would know that about Caleb, a home-schooled A-student whose dream is to become a cardiologist and who has shadowed Dr. Harmon twice to see the doctor work.

And then there’s Caleb’s weight lifting. The formerly overweight boy, who now sports 16-inch biceps and a 40.5-inch chest after two years of strenuous training with partners Tom Reese and Tim Pruite, has entered two weightlifting competitions. He placed first in his class in both, lifting 330 pounds in his most recent competition and defeating 10 competitors in the two meets combined.

Prettyman, whose only dietary supplement is protein powder – no steroids or anything else harmful or questionable, is now training at Nautilus Fitness Center in Alton, where he also works as a trainer and maintenance man. His next competition is in Oct., where he plans to bench press more than 400 pounds.

But for all his success as a weight lifter, Caleb Prettyman says the sport is just a hobby. His real goals are to attend and graduate from college and become a cardiologist.

The son of a minister, re-born to help those in need.

Could make for a good sermon.

 

My wife read this and brought up some points.

She said she thinks the story is too disjointed, too fragmented.

She said the weight-lifting just seems thrown in there, unnecessarily.

She prefers the story be told in a more linear fashion. Start with the story leading up to the kid's birth, the miracle, and what he's done since. But my problem with that is that the climax of the story (his birth) is in the middle of the story. After reading that he survived, what reason is there to keep reading to his weight lifting stuff?

What do you all think?

 

Mr Shackleford,

BRIGHTON – The father’s sermon is reaching a crescendo now.

“Have you ever been to the place where it hits you so fast and so hard, it’s like all of the sudden you can’t even remember how to pray?” he says. Where, when, some sort of placement detail

His voice is rising and falling like the tides, seemingly several octaves higher than normal. One moment it’s difficult to hear it’s so quiet, the next it’s almost frighteningly loud.

“(The devil) kept coming at me and saying, ‘What are you going to do now? Where’s all your fancy preaching now?’ And I started to agree with him. Yeah, where is it now? What am I going to do now? He was destroying me.” maybe tighten

It may sound all fire-and-brimstone, the type of repent now or take a first-class ticket straight to the bottom of hell kind of sermon popular during John Milton’s time.

But viewing it that way would be missing the point entirely. It’s a sermon about life, about giving thanks. The crux of the story begins with the moment of his son'sbirth. And then his son's death. And then his son's miraculous re-birth.

Then get us to the son, show us the little miracle's strength, conventionally weight-lifting and the spiritual ...

Probably can use a little more speed in getting there but I think it's the right idea.

YHS, etc