Nancy Pearl

Was glad to see several members of the writers' group at the Nancy Pearl chat at the PD on Aug. 20. Wasn't she terrific. I've decided that my doorway into books is language/prose/writing.

The Girl in the Window

As a reminder that we still need newspapers to do the kind of good, important work no one else will do, here's a poignant narrative that ran in the St. Pete Times last week:

http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/article750838.ece

It says so much in so few, simple words

This NY Times Sunday Styles story hooked me from the start. You can just see this ditzy girl, representing the entire trend of low-key turns party hot spot.

By ALLEN SALKIN
Published: July 6, 2008
Montauk, N.Y.

Lauren Morris’s gold lamé high heels kept getting stuck between the planks of the patio deck.

A male friend who shares her rental house in Southampton had warned her on a recent Saturday night to wear flats to Surf Lodge, the trendy new nightspot for the Hamptons crowd. But she was not the type of woman to have packed party shoes without heels.

Her only alternative were flip-flops, which she only wore “to not touch the floor in my share house,” said Ms. Morris, an account executive in a fashion showroom. “They’re gross.”

Wearing a sun-yellow tube dress, Ms. Morris held a glass of champagne, with a blueberry, a blackberry and a strawberry floating in it, and surveyed the scene. A reggae-influenced band played loudly as young men in pressed oxford shirts and jeans with complicated back-pocket designs were sprawled on ottomans. Eyeing them were tan women in skimpy floral-print sundresses.

“I’ve been coming to the Hamptons for years,” Ms. Morris, 29, shouted. “This is my first time in Montauk.”

That’s right, Montauk, known as “The End.” Not Bridgehampton, East Hampton or Southampton, where the thumping fabulousness on display at the Surf Lodge has long been a mark of summertime. Montauk, the easternmost tip of Long Island, is a town that has for generations been distinctly, and proudly low-key, the un-Hampton, where commercial fishermen live and work, and where middle-class families could afford hotel rooms, miniature golf and soft-serve ice cream.

Read the whole story: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/fashion/06hampton.html?scp=1&sq=montauk&st=cse#

Another good story

I'm trying my best to turn this into a sportswriting blog! Here's a another good story I found on espn.com, this is about the death of Len Bias to a cocaine overdose 22 years ago. If anyone is any kind of sports fan or even was around then, this is a story that impacted so many people. It's the first sports story I really remember.

This has an interesting structure. The writer uses first person in a couple sections, and I think it's done in a good way -- it really drives home how this story impacted everyone, even the writer when he was just 13 years old.

Here's the first-person passage I liked:

I do not know whether Len Bias was a martyr, or whether in death, as his mother often says, he has brought life. I do not know whether, as Jesse Jackson claimed in eulogizing Bias -- likening him to Martin Luther King Jr., Mozart, Gandhi and Jesus -- that the Lord "sometimes uses our best people to get our attention." I do not know whether Len Bias died for any reason at all, divine or otherwise, beyond the fact he ingested a massive amount of dangerously pure cocaine in a brief period of time, short-circuiting the electrical impulses to his heart muscle. I do not know whether, as many claim, the Boston Celtics would have extended the Bird-McHale-Parish dynasty by several seasons if Len Bias had lived. I do not know if he was the catalyst for another decades-long New England curse. I do not know whether he would have been better/as good as/in the same stratosphere as Michael Jordan if he had lived to play in the National Basketball Association. We can argue these issues all we like, but I believe that, because the answers to such questions can never be determined, the questions have become irrelevant, obscured by the mythology that Autopsy No. 86-999 has engendered.

I do know death -- especially sudden and premature death -- has a way of obscuring many truths (see: Dean, James; Cobain, Kurt; et al.).

I do know I was 13 when Len Bias died, and it scared the hell out of me. It was supposed to scare the hell out of me; this was a moralistic passion play, an after-school special come to life.

I do know the public narrative was deceptively simple: Len Bias had just experienced the most euphoric moment of his life, and he had an unquestionably bright future, and he had chosen to experiment with illicit substances for the first time -- perhaps, some errant rumors went, it was crack cocaine -- and in a freak occurrence of bad karma, his heart had stopped.

And I do believe that because of this public narrative and the consequences of this narrative, the death of Len Bias can be classified as the most socially influential moment in the history of modern sports.


The whole story is really long, so I'll just post the link here:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=bias&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab1pos1

A week off

It's summertime in the city, and we're taking a week off from the Writers' Block for July.

Figuring few people want to talk shop on July 3 (the first Thursday of the month and the beginning of a perfectly good long weekend), we're pushing our meeting back to July 10. Scott Stephens will lead, and rumors are, we'll be in the private room upstairs at Great Lakes Brewery in Ohio City.

We'll cancel July 17 and resume meeting the first Thursday in August.

So until then, happy writing!

Up next: metaphors and similes

To warm up for next week's (June 19) session, here's my favorite simile of all time, courtesy of Anna Quindlen's "Object Lessons."

"Her children slipped out of her as easily as if she were a water slide into the crowded pool of their household."

Some good writing

Just because I feel like we need a post to liven things up, and because there is not nearly enough sports in our lives, here's a column from Rick Reilly, new to ESPN. Debut columns are so tough -- even though he's not exactly an unknown coming from Sports Illustrated -- but I really loved how he used his father to introduce how he became the man and writer he is now. It's touching.


THE LIFE OF REILLY
By Rick Reilly
Since this is my first column for The Magazine, I figure I should introduce myself. And maybe the best way to tell you who I am is to tell you about my dad, Jack. He was an Irish tenor, a yarn spinner, a songwriter, a father of four, a crack golfer and a first-class drunk.

As kids, we blamed golf. We thought the game made him meaner than a dyspeptic rattler. We were sure it was more important than we were, or why was he never around? More than once he asked me, "What grade are you in again?"

He'd always come home drunk after playing golf, except for the times he'd come home dripping drunk. Then he'd be looking to bust something, maybe a lamp, maybe somebody's nose; my mom's, once. To this day, the sound of spikes on cement sends a shot of ice through me. That was him coming up the sidewalk.

In alcoholic families, the youngest kid becomes the mascot. That was me. I became the funny one, comic relief, third-grade vaudeville—anything to keep the furniture where it was. When he'd eventually stagger into bed, the rat in my stomach would finally stop gnawing.

When I was about 10 or 11, I started working through the thing backward. If I could play golf with him, maybe I could keep him from drinking. I'd be the hero! So I started asking him to take me. He did once, but my fear of him was so paralyzing that any instruction he gave sounded like a shotgun blast in my ear. After about three holes, I stormed off the course in tears and waited in the car.

I didn't play again until high school. I did it partly to understand what was so wonderful about a game that would keep a man from coming to his kids' games and piano recitals and birthday parties.

And I was happy to find out it wasn't the Titleist clubs that made him so mean, it was the Canadian Clubs. It was the whiskey. Golf was this green-and-blue launching pad for little white rockets. Golf taught me the lessons my dad never did, including the best one: You play life where it lies. You hit it there. You play it from there. Nobody threw you a nasty curve or forgot to block the defensive end. I learned that my mistakes were mine alone, not my boss', not the cop's and, as much as I hated to admit it, not my dad's.

And then one day, out of the blue, maybe 25 years ago, my dad went to one AA meeting and quit drinking. Never had a drop after that.

It was five more years before I finally believed it. Then I invited him to the Masters. He was 70, I was 30. And it was on that two-and-a-half-hour ride from Atlanta to Augusta that we finally met.

He told me his life story, how he drank and fought to get the attention of his distant father, how he'd kept from us that he'd been married before, and how sorry he was to have let his family grow up while he was holding down the 19th hole with his elbows.

He apologized and cried. I forgave him and cried. I never dreamed I-20 could be that emotional.
Suddenly he understood. He went home to Boulder, Colo., and apologized to my mom and my brother and two sisters. They finally got to tell him how much he hurt them. He wrote us a poem about his love for us and his shame and why nobody would cry the day he died.

It took a lot of guts and a lot of courage, and the only lousy part was that it came so late. By the time I saw him for who he was—a strong man who took most of a lifetime to understand his crushing weakness—I was ears deep into my own family and career. So we didn't play much golf together before the warranty on his heart started to expire. I never got to really see the swing that won all those trophies. By then, the only time he used his putter was as a cane.

Two months ago, on the final night of his life, I sat alone in a chair next to his hospice bed, holding his hand and a box of Kleenex and proving how wrong poems can be sometimes.

As I looked at him, I realized that for better and worse, he'd shaped me. I think I'm a good father borne of his rotten example. I'm a storyteller out of surviving him. I'm a man with more flaws than a 1986 Yugo, but I try to own up to them, because a very good Irish tenor showed me how.

And that's what I call a very good save.

HELP! Please!

Ok, so this is more about reporting than writing. But I'm working on a story with Mike O'Malley about Solon -- its seemingly bloated payroll and budget.

We're comparing Solon to similar cities, based on size, demographics, population growth, etc. And both Lake Forest, Ill., and Hudson, NH, have fewer employees and smaller budgets. I'm handling Lake Forest, a tony Chicago suburb, which like Solon runs a golf course and senior center. But it has 50 fewer employees.

So far, all I've done is compare the payrolls and budgets. And while I have calls in/appointments to talk to the folks in charge, I'm not really sure where to go from here. I'm not really sure what the story should focus on.

Any suggestions, please send them my way!

ideas and inspiration

As we nurture a writing blog in PDland, check out some others that sprang from newsrooms. You've probably heard of Newsgems, but gangrey.com offers more range and surprise. It was launched by newsies at the St. Pete Times. Their motto, "Bailing water from a sinking ship," belies their optimism and love of our craft. And the granddady of them all, the "Power of Words" site of the Providence Journal, usually offers a cool tip and a great read.
Bob

The inaugural post

To kick off our blog and our ever-so-aptly named writer's group, I'm sharing my favorite column by my favorite writer (ok, more like my idol), Anna Quindlen.

(LOVE the simile in the last graf, and long to write similes and metaphors so seemingly moothly.)

WRITERS ON WRITING; The Eye of the Reporter, The Heart of the Novelist

By ANNA QUINDLEN
September 23, 2002, New York Times

There's always a notebook in my purse. I learned my lesson one day many years ago when I found myself at the scene of a crime, taking notes on the back of checking account deposit slips. Before I was a novelist, I was a columnist; and before I was a columnist, I was a reporter; and the reporter is always there, jumbled amid the Altoids, the keys and the lipstick, there forever in the notebook.

The connection between the two incarnations, between the newspaper and the novel, is clear to me but confusing to readers. Here is the question they ask most often, the one that underlines the covertly snobbish way in which we delineate the professions from the so-called arts: How did you manage to make the leap from journalism to fiction?

I used to answer flatly that there's not much difference between the two, that good writing is good writing wherever you find it. But that answer really threw people into a swivet, speaking to their deepest suspicions about both lines of work. It turned out that when I was writing about the people I actually met and the places I actually went, the enterprise was enshadowed by reader suspicion that we reporters made everything up. But when I made things up as a novelist, readers always suspected I was presenting a thinly disguised version of the facts of my own life.

So the facts were assumed to be fiction, and the fiction fact. Go figure, as the guys at Katz's delicatessen used to say. The quotation is somewhere in one of my old notebooks; I know it's true.

The truth is that the best preparation I could have had for a life as a novelist was life as a reporter. At a time when more impressionistic renderings of events were beginning to creep into the news pages, I learned to look always for the telling detail: the Yankees cap, the neon sign in the club window, the striped towel on the deserted beach. Those things that, taken incrementally, make a convincing picture of real life, and maybe get you onto Page 1, too.

I learned to distinguish between those details that simply existed and those that revealed. Those telling details are the essence of fiction that feels real. The command of those details explains why Charles Dickens, a onetime reporter, has a byline for the ages.

I learned, from decades of writing down their words verbatim in notebooks, how real people talk. I learned that syntax and rhythm were almost as individual as a fingerprint, and that one quotation, precisely transcribed and intentionally untidied, could delineate a character in a way that pages of exposition never could.

All of us in journalism know of the times we've read a neat little quotation that seemed to sum up the entire point of a story, and we thought, almost reflexively, ''It's piped,'' reporter's jargon for ''It's invented.'' It's just too pat, too flat, too homogenized, too perfect at one level, too impersonal at another. That happens in fiction, too, the line of dialogue that sounds like a speech or a stage direction or a maxim instead of a sentence. You can hear the fake with a reporter's ear.

I learned in newspapers to make every word count. All those years of being given 1,200 words, of having the 1,200 pared to 900 at 3 o'clock, of having to take out another 100 to shoehorn it into the hole in the layout: it teaches you to make the distinction between what is necessary and illuminating and what is simply you in love with the sound of your own voice.

A novelist doesn't write to space, of course; 80,000 words, 100,000, it's up to the writer to say when the story is done. Some have a harder time than others. The most common shortcoming I find in good novels nowadays is excess; many of them should be 50 pages shorter than they are. I learned how to cut where cutting is commonplace, swift and draconian.

In that same place, crowded and noisy and redolent of adrenaline in the late afternoons, I learned about writer's block, too. People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently. That's not the way it works, and one of the best places to learn that is a newspaper, which in its instant obsolescence is infinitely forgiving.

Some days you plod, some days you soar, but always you churn out copy on demand, whether you feel the muse or not. (Where is the muse, by the way? Does she ever show up?) Occasionally you hit it, grinning behind the nominal privacy of your partition like a Mardi Gras mask.

Jacques Barzun once wrote: ''Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper, not eternal bronze: let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes. No one will rush out and print it as it stands.'' Journalism is the professional embodiment of that soothing sentiment.

Of course, it is also the professional embodiment of fact-finding, and that, more than anything else, is why a switch to fiction by a journalist perplexes readers and even colleagues. ''I could never make it up,'' one of the very best reporters I've ever known said to me a little accusingly. But that notion of untrammeled invention becomes illusory after a while, even in the most freewheeling novel. (Although, as a former reporter, I undoubtedly find a thrill in being able to take a name that is unwieldy and simply to change it, poof!)

If you manage to build characters from the ground up carefully, make them really real, your ability to invent decreases as their verisimilitude grows. Certain people will only behave in certain ways; certain behaviors will only lead to certain other behaviors. The entire range of possible events decreases as characters choose one road, not another. Plot is like a perspective drawing, its possible permutations growing narrower and narrower, until it reaches a fixed point in the distance. That point is the ending. Life is like that. Fiction is like life, at least if it is good.

I always wanted to write fiction. It said in my high school prophecy, ''Ambition: to write the great American novel.'' (I'm just reporting the facts here, mortifying as they may be.) I only went into the newspaper business to pay the rent. And then I discovered that, for a Catholic girl with napkin-on-the-lap manners, the professional obligation to go places I was not welcome and ask questions that were intrusive and even rude was as exhilarating as work could be.

I drank bourbon at noon in the police shack and got spit on at town meetings by folks who couldn't inveigh without expectorating. I rode in a search-and-rescue plane in a snowstorm, and I rode in a limo with the mayor in high dudgeon. Geez, what a deal.

I taught myself a shorthand of my own invention, and I use it still. But now, memory being what it is, or more often isn't, my notes are the ideas for a new novel that occur to me as real life eddies around me. ''Rd hr,'' means one character will be a redhead, and ''Viet Wr?'' means another may have fought in that conflict. It's just that the scene I see is not, as in my past life, in Flatbush or on Fifth Avenue.

The story, the people, the neighborhood: they're all in my own mind. But the notebook still helps to keep the details fresh and true, to hold the quotations clear as consonants, to provide those little touchstones that will rescue me from the slough of writer's despondency. I am a reporter of invented stories now, but no less a reporter because of that.