Story of the year so far?

[Clever username]

What about my gamer on last week's district cross country meet? Forget story of the year, I'm thinking Pulitzer.

 

[Double Down]

Billy, absolutely. In fact, I've been wanting to start a thread that I can hopefully get the mods here to sticky where we specifically discuss pieces of narrative writing, and talk about why they did or did no work, but for now, let's talk about it here.

(Had to break this up into two posts, so read on if you're interested.)

I want to make it clear, up front, that I still make these kind of errors in judgement from time to time, and that I don't think this kind of writing is bad, just that I think it's a bit overdone, and a lot of it has to do with Gary's influence on the craft.

Here is an excerpt from Mike Wise's story about Gilbert Arenas this weekend that has Smith-ian undertones, and it's something you see a lot of when a writer is trying to get you to grasp a story with a lot of scope to it. I could probably dig up a feature on some high school kid that was written by someone fresh out of college, but I'd prefer to use Wise because he's a big boy, a decent guy, and he'll be able to handle it (I think) if he sees me using his stuff as an example of the kind of paragraphs that skirt the line between great writing and over-writing.

To understand Arenas, you have to go back to the beginning. To understand his journey, where he has traveled and how he came to light up a moribund basketball team in Washington, you need to start over. To understand the player who gallops off the Verizon Center floor bare-chested after tossing his jersey into the stands following Wizards home games, who likes to practice alone in the middle of the night, who must own every DVD and collectible jersey he can buy, who is such an extroverted performer that he leaves work to become a solitary homebody, you have to go back to the rundown Overtown section of Miami. You have to go back to apartment No. 9.

You have to go back to the mother who gave him up there. And then you have to come forward, to the mother of his 10-month-old baby girl and the opulent red brick home he bought for them on a cul-de-sac in the Virginia suburbs.

Now, I think the use of the second person here is fine. If I were Mike's editor, I might have asked him to think about it a little bit more, and decide if he thought the use of the second-person, the talking to the reader, was really the best way to get me into the story, and if he said yes, I would have been fine with it because Wise is a good, experienced writer who can control that kind of thing, and obviously the piece is a good one. But that's a Smith technique, without question, and when it goes bad, when it's over the top, it gets hokey and clunky real fast. You're hitting the reader over the head pretty hard, practically shouting THIS STORY HAS A DEEPER MEANING! IT'S IMPORTANT! That's fine. Stories should have deeper meaning and be important. But sometimes it's best to let the reader figure that out on their own instead of writing stuff like, "to understand (blank), you have to go back to the beginning." That's become a cliche'. I've written it myself too many times, and it's a little lazy. It's become the narrative equivalent of saying, "What a difference a season makes."

Now, show you where this kind of stuff comes from, here is Gary Smith writing about Mia Hamm:

Don't read this story. For Mia's sake. Don't read it or even look at the pictures. It might take too long. Then she'd feel like a burden. You might get to know her. Then she'd have to agonize over what you think.

She'll be disappearing soon anyway. For good. She's got one more year, the woman who launched millions of girls across thousands of fields. Two final engagements on the world stage. The first begins this weekend, in the World Cup, which is back on U.S. soil because of the SARS epidemic in China. The second occurs in Athens, at next summer's Olympics. In between she'll marry one of the greatest shortstops in baseball, but there's no way you'll see that.

Perhaps, in spite of her, we'll see her place in history--the first female team-sport superstar--and finally understand how many more complications lay in her path than in those blazed by the women icons of the solo sports, the Babes and Billie Jeans, the Wilmas and Chrissies and Peggys who preceded her.

It's tricky business, being anointed queen amid a circle of female peers, having to dismantle the throne even as you sit on it. Maybe she can pull it off here too. Maybe she can fill a dozen magazine pages without being seen. Maybe at the end you still won't know what makes a woman ignite and extinguish herself all at once.

CONT.

 

[Double Down]

Even Smith sometimes bugs me when he does that. It's hard to criticize someone you respect and adore, especially when that person is so much more ridiculously talented than you, but the reason why Gary inspires a lot of bad writing is that people try to copy his style when the subject matter doesn't necessarily warrant it. Think about this story that Saslow wrote. He could have done something like this:

This is a story about hope. It's a story about disappointment, about friendship, about courage, and a man who had to find himself after he had nearly everything was snatched away from him in a cruel twist of fate. Are you ready? Are you listening? Because every paragraph from this point will take you deeper into a family's nightmares, so deep you're not certain you'll ever make it out alive. But at the end of the journey, you just might understand why the most important step you take, each day, is the first.

Blah. How much better was it that we just got to see all that unfold?

Even if Eli had done something like that -- and obviously he would have written it better than I just did -- he probaly could have gotten away with it because it is, after all, a story about a kid who nearly died and had his entire life torn to pieces. But every story can't have a community's soul at stake, or a mystery solved by the power of love, or a search for faith, or a man's journey to find himself before it's too late. Most Gary Smith stories do, and that's because he gravitates toward those subjects that deserve it. I just think that if you're not as talented as Gary Smith, which most of us aren't, you have to be careful when you try to ask the question, What Does It All Mean. I've seen people write those kind of stories about a high school football player who tears an ACL. There's not quite enough emotional captial invested to write like it's a metaphor for the triumph of the human spirit.

Anyway, there are a lot of people here could probably explain what I'm talking about better than I can, but that's the best I can offer. Hopefully I'll start that narrative writing thread, and we can get people more interested in talking about it, because this place could be a hell of a teaching tool if we worked a little bit at it.

 

[Cosmo]

Double Down, great stuff.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially when I write features and even sometimes when I write gamers.

There's a line to be found. I don't want my stories to be ordinary. I think I have a pretty decent voice and I've been told that by people in this business that I respect. So I want to use that voice, find a way to creatively tell what could very well be a hum-drum story. Isn't that our job sometimes? To make the ordinary interesting using a variety of literary devices at our disposal.

Then I'll read something by Gary Smith. Or the recent SI piece on Chad Johnson that is pretty well done and very well reported. Or the Mike Wise Arenas piece. Whatever. Then I'll try to do something that's completely ridiculous. I'll try to add a narrative voice that I'm not qualified to give to a story. I'll try to do too much and it comes off as an overwritten piece of junk. I'm assuming Mike Wise interviewed one hell of a lot of people for his Arenas piece. He visited Apartment nine. He went to Los Angeles. He's qualified to set a scene because of the depth of his reporting.

So where is that line. I wrote a piece today that I thought was a little better than ordinary, but I'm left wishing I had more time to do background, to conduct a few more interviews. But damn, the reality of daily deadlines, travel, notebooks, all of that stuff that goes along with doing a beat kind of puts a damper on expanding that story. Not to mention trying to write a magazine-style story in 25 inches is difficult at best and impossible at worst. Just not enough space to flesh out full ideas.

I want my stories to have voice, but I don't want to overwrite them to the point where readers are going, WTF? There is a balance, right?

 

[jgmacg]

DD -

Nice post. You can always start a narrative strategies thread over in the Writers' Workshop. Or sticky one here. Or go case by case as the spirit moves.

And let me know if there's any interest in live chats with writers. Happy to try to set some up.

 

[shotglass]

Cosmo, those, too, are good points.

And I bring this up most definitely not to tweak you ... this probably isn't the right time to question it, but since we're looking at writing, anyway ...

I'm just curious, from a writer, why this part of your post would be punctuated like this:

Isn't that our job sometimes? To make the ordinary interesting using a variety of literary devices at our disposal.

Wouldn't the proper way be:

"Isn't that our job sometimes, to make the ordinary interesting using a variety of literary devices at our disposal?"

Otherwise, I think we're dealing with a sentence fragment there on the second part, and that second part IS still part of the question.

(Now, if we want to talk about sentence fragments, and how they're becoming an accepted part of writing "style," oh, I can REALLY go on...)

 

[Cosmo]

Well, yeah, you're correct shot. I wasn't all that worried about my grammar on that post, obviously. :D

 

[shotglass]

I'm sorry. I know you weren't. Just that I've seen it handled that way other places, and I wondered if maybe I was missing something.

 

[Cosmo]

Nope, you weren't missing anything. Just me being sloppy and tired.

 

[85bears]

Double - Great take on the narrative writing stuff. I wish there were more textbooks and so forth out there that helped out with that stuff. I guess it's kind of graduate level journalism, so you don't get that deep in an undergraduate J-school, at least we didn't in mine. Too much else to get into in those four years. Saslow's story really pulled me along, despite its length. I wish SI and ESPN ran stories written like that too often - I think they often think, "narrative piece, gotta get the 'Smith Graph' in there!" (they should start calling it that).

Wise's Arenas feature was fabulous and will probably finish top five in APSE, but those two "You must go back to the beginning paragraphs" made me stop and say, "Huh? What?" Perhaps it has less to do with Smith-itis and more to do with writers, when going long, feeling like they have to at least touch on everything early on in the piece, for fear they might otherwise lose the reader.

 

[NorCal]

As Double-D notes, Smith gravitates to these larger-meaning stories because that's his thing -- he likes stories he can sink his teeth into. He also writes only a handful a year and is able to devote months at a time to each.

As Cosmo notes, it's all but impossible to do that when you also have to cover a beat on a daily basis.

And I think those are the key point: You have to pick the topic carefully and make sure you have time to do it justice before you try this at home.

Of course, that's assuming you have the talent to write that way in the first place, which not every one of us does. There are horses for courses, and not every sports writer is cut out for long takeouts. When you're not, but you try anyway, you're likely to come up short. Pick your spots, and know your limitations.

 

[Jones]

Whenever I'm guilty of overwriting, it's because I don't feel like the story, on its own, is good enough to carry itself. Either I've made a poor topic choice from the start, or I've failed somewhere along the line in my reporting. So you try to gloss it up with some elaborate story device and lots of wah-wah pedal.

But if a story's worth telling, you probably don't need many tricks to get people to the end of it. Just make sure it hangs nicely, and that the writing is crisp and perhaps a little artful, and that the ending is somehow surprising and yet inevitable-seeming, and you're even money to have done good work.

 

[Pringle]

Whenever I'm guilty of overwriting, it's because I don't feel like the story, on its own, is good enough to carry itself. Either I've made a poor topic choice from the start, or I've failed somewhere along the line in my reporting. So you try to gloss it up with some elaborate story device and lots of wah-wah pedal.

But if a story's worth telling, you probably don't need many tricks to get people to the end of it. Just make sure it hangs nicely, and that the writing is crisp and perhaps a little artful, and that the ending is somehow surprising and yet inevitable-seeming, and you're even money to have done good work.

Man, this stuff is EASY!

 

[Jones]

Okay, Pringle, that's pretty damn funny.

No, it's not easy. What I meant was, it's not all that complicated, either. It's telling a story... Like cave painting, only with more adjectives.

 

[e4]

So easy a caveman can do it!

 

[Pringle]

Okay, Pringle, that's pretty damn funny.

No, it's not easy. What I meant was, it's not all that complicated, either. It's telling a story... Like cave painting, only with more adjectives.

I was just kidding. I really liked the way you explained it - an ending that is surprising while also seeming inevitable.

I think the key virtue in such storytelling is patience. Maybe that comes with age. It takes both a keen "ear" and the confidence and patience that you can get it to that point to do so.

 

[friend of the friendless]

Sirs, Madames,

****. Ten minutes before I read DD's narrative jag I just wrote

This is a story about walls ...

I am the world's biggest loser. Or should I let that go unstated.

Your Humbled Servant, etc

 

[shotglass]

Heh-heh. It speaks well of you that you would admit it.

 

[Jones]

Sirs, Madames,

****. Ten minutes before I read DD's narrative jag I just wrote

This is a story about walls ...

I am the world's biggest loser. Or should I let that go unstated.

Your Humbled Servant, etc

That is freaking hysterical. Seriously. I'm in tears.