Notes From A Writing Coach

2007-05-04T19:18:00.000-07:00

Write no lies

A journalism teacher recently raised a question on a listserv. He said he had some colleagues who thought it was acceptable to use composite characters and dress up the setting in a story.

How depressing.

After all the scandals in recent years involving reporters, memoirists and historians who have been caught lying, it is disheartening to hear that some teachers think it is all right to deceive readers. Take note, please. These rules will save your honor, your self-respect and maybe your career:

Make up nothing.

Embellish nothing.

The minute you make anything up or embellish setting or anything else, you’re writing fiction.

Do not use composite characters. They are fiction. When they are used without disclosure to the reader, they are lies. With disclosure, they are a cheap gimmick. And they still put your entire story in doubt. If the reader knows you’re willing to make up a character, he can’t help but wonder what else you may have made up.

Don’t change quotes. You can take out the meaningless noise—the ums, ahs and ers—and you can render words in regular English instead of dialect—“gonna” is “going to”—but don’t change the words. I like the guideline John McIntyre spelled out on his blog recently: “We don’t want the words the speaker uses in print to be different from the speaker’s words as broadcast on the television or radio.”

Don’t use other people’s writing without giving them credit. Be generous with credit. Taking other writers’ words without acknowledging the authors is plagiarism. In more blunt terms, a plagiarist is a liar and a thief.

Stay out of people’s heads. You cannot know what anyone thinks. Don’t pretend you can.

Don’t lie by omission. If you distort the story by leaving out information essential to understanding, it is just as wrong as making up details.

Don’t ignore that uneasy feeling in the back of your mind. Pay attention to it.

The rules hold in all forms of nonfiction, including narrative. Some writers think that narrative gives them license to play loose with the facts. It doesn’t. Narrative requires reporting that is every bit as rigorous as straight news writing and requires the same unyielding standards of accuracy.

2007-03-16T20:18:00.000-07:00

Read for pleasure, not duty

In his book On Writing, Stephen King says:

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcuts.

“I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction.”

Slow reader? Maybe, but his yearly total is pretty respectable.

Mr. King’s advice is dead on, but it is probably wasted on people who don’t already have the reading habit. These are people who tell you they love to read, but they just don’t have time. They are going to read more when they get the time. No, they’re not. They might as well quit kidding themselves.

Some of them might develop the reading habit if they thought of reading as a pleasure, which it is, and not as a duty.

Read what you enjoy, or read because you want to learn something that interests you. Don’t worry about reading what you think you should read, or what other people think you should read.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t enjoy books that are supposed to be good for you. If you have to force yourself to read, you won’t stick with it long and you won’t get much out of it.

But sample all sorts of writing. Before dismissing a book as boring, give it a chance. Read a page or two or three. Good writing has a way of drawing you in even when the subject never interested you before.

If you read for pleasure, read a lot, you will soak up writing lessons without trying. After a while, though, you will find yourself noticing the lessons—beginning to see how the writer achieves the effects that make the story work. This won’t lessen your pleasure; it will increase it.

Many books have more to give than you can get from one reading. The classic example is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. An adolescent can read it as an adventure story. The same reader can revisit the book with a more mature understanding and discover that it is not only a great adventure story, but also is a commentary on slavery and human nature.

A lesser-known example is The Ballad of the Flim-Flam Man by Guy Owen. It’s a novel about a down-at-the-heels grifter and a young rube who ramble across North Carolina working one small-time swindle after another. You can read it as a rollicking comedy, which it is. But if you read it again, the novel will take you deeper and deeper until the laughter becomes mixed with sorrow and sympathy for the frailties of human beings. (You know, don’t you, that sorrow and pain are the wellsprings of much of our humor?)

One class of books is especially worth reading again and again: guidebooks for writers. A writer can read these for pleasure as well as for the learning. If a book on writing well isn’t pleasurable reading, it isn’t likely that the author has much to teach you.

You can return to a book such as The Careful Writer by Theodore Bernstein or On Writing Well by William Zinsser and gain something new every time. Here are some other writing books that reward you every time you go back to them: Stein on Writing, by Sol Stein; The Book on Writing, by Paula LaRocque; The Word, by Rene J. Cappon; The Writer’s Art, by James J. Kilpatrick.

Some writers may scorn the recommendation to read books on the craft. In The Language of the Night, Ursula K. LeGuin says she doesn’t read such books. I wouldn’t presume to argue the point with her. Her success—she is one of our most honored writers of science fiction and fantasy—speaks for itself.

Most of us, though, including me, aren’t as smart as she is. Books on the craft won’t infuse creativity or make you an original thinker. They can, however, help you learn the tools and techniques you need and save you much effort. It seems to me that so many writers struggle to discover principles that were discovered long ago—as far back as Aristotle. Some of that struggle is unnecessary.

2007-03-02T17:49:00.000-08:00

Forging beyond the first draft

A friend sent the first draft of a story and it wasn’t good. My friend tends to beat herself up when the writing doesn’t come easily, but she shouldn’t. It is OK when a first draft fails to be brilliant—provided the writer understands that the draft is just the beginning of the work.

The writer fails only if he or she tries to foist the draft on readers—or dumps it on an editor to salvage.

Some writers in journalism pay lip service to the idea of revising, but the truth is they don’t want to do it. As soon as they get a story in written form, however rough, they want to move on to the next one.

The nature of journalism tends to encourage impatience and short attention spans—or at least gives these writers an excuse for their attitude. Some stories must be written on deadline, with no time to rewrite. Because rewriting is sometimes not feasible, the writers find it easy to avoid even when it is feasible. The writers get in the habit of regarding rewriting as an artsy-craftsy indulgence. They get unspoken reinforcement from editors who accept rough drafts and publish them as is or who do the revision the writers should be required to do.

The truth is, though, that often the reporter has time, or can arrange to have time, for rewriting. Many news and feature stories need not be written on deadline.

The better writers learn to embrace the opportunity to do new drafts, and some enjoy it. They learn to throw out words, phrases, paragraphs that don’t serve the story.

Revising allows them to:

Reshape the story. First drafts often lack focus and flow. In subsequent drafts, the writer imposes order—or lets the story find its natural order.

Trim flab. This can include even elements—anecdotes, bits of description, clever metaphors—that might be fine in themselves but don’t advance the story.

Nail the theme. At the heart of a good story is an idea, even though it may not be expressed directly. Sometimes the idea gets lost in the first draft.

Hide the seams: Part of what makes rough drafts rough is the clumsy way the parts are stitched together. Characters are introduced awkwardly. Quotes are plopped in without enough context for the reader to understand.

First drafts might come out better more often if writers would take the trouble to plan them. Many journalists don’t. This is another idea they pay lip service to but fail to practice.

Instead of organizing the story, they concentrate on writing a clever lead, or what they imagine to be a clever lead. They hope the rest of the story will flow from their lead. If the story is the least bit complicated, this is a route to disaster.

Again, it is all right if the first draft is disastrous, so long as you revise it. But at some point, you need to map out the story, so why not do it before the first draft and get ahead of the game? You may still need to revise that draft, but the revision will probably be considerably easier.

I mentioned my friend who was having trouble with a story. A couple of days later, she sent another draft and it was much better. I knew it would be. My friend is a pro.

2007-02-22T14:51:00.000-08:00

Lessons on the serial narrative

Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute is crafting a “starter kit” on writing serial narratives in newspapers.

Check it out. Even if you are not a journalist, you can learn from Mr. Clark’s teachings. In fact, you should make it a point to read his Writing Tools blog and all of his articles on storytelling. Read his own serial narratives.

As I’ve said before, narratives—whether done as serials or single stories—are wonderful magnets for readers. I wish more newspaper editors encouraged their writers to use narrative tools and taught them how to do it.

But as I have also said before, narratives done badly are terrible. Some journalists hear that word “narrative” and they suddenly start writing purple prose, dripping with adjectives and adverbs. They seem to think narrative is a license to write tedious description, to substitute literary-sounding clichés for solid details and to plod into stories with leisurely leads that bore readers. The results can be embarrassing.

Writing a narrative is different from writing conventional news and feature stories. It requires a different approach and different techniques, and these must be learned. They must be practiced, too.

Practice with small narratives. A narrative need not be a blockbuster or a serial with multiple chapters. Good narratives can be done in 12 to 20 inches. They can even be done on deadline.

Practice using narrative techniques even in stories that are not narratives. A section of dialogue, for example, might add zing to that meeting story you have to write.

When you can write a taut short narrative, when you are comfortable with the tools of narrative—description, dialogue, suspense, scenes, cliffhangers—then you can try more ambitious projects such as a serial.

2007-02-08T16:59:00.000-08:00

Never defend bad writing as style

Voice and style matter, but inexperienced writers do best to approach them indirectly, with their attention on other issues.

If they think about their style and voice as they write, they may exaggerate or distort both. Concentrate, instead, on matters such as accuracy, clarity and simplicity. Concentrate on the goal of making the work easy and pleasurable for the reader. If writers do that, style and voice will take care of themselves.

This advice isn’t needed by writers who have mastered their craft. Such writers have the discipline to make conscious decisions about voice and carry them off.

In any case, there’s nothing sacred about voice and style. Never use them to defend bad writing. Some writers do that because their egos won’t let them admit the writing is bad or because they are insecure.

They turn in copy that is turgid and stuffy or, at the other extreme, sophomorically breezy. Then they get all prickly if an editor dares to tamper with it.

As a coach, I would rather work with almost any other writer than one who prattles about voice and style and can’t face the least criticism.

Any writer has a voice. The question is whether the voice is appealing. People won’t sit in an audience listening to a speaker whose voice is unpleasant, and readers won’t stay with a writer whose work is boring or distracting.

If the writing isn’t working, it needs to be fixed. The way to fix it is to focus not on voice or style but on the specific problems that mar the work.

Is the copy deadened by cliches and deadwood? Get rid of them. Are there strained similes and labored metaphors? Cut them. Is the tone pompous because the writer is being pretentious and trying to show off his vocabulary? Rewrite, using plain words and speaking conversationally to the reader.

Fix the problems, whatever they are, and you will find that style and voice are much improved.

2007-01-15T14:05:00.000-08:00

Why I've been absent so long

It has been much too long since I posted a note on this blog, and I apologize.

I have an excuse. Shortly after Thanksgiving, I had triple-bypass surgery. Believe me, this will put a crimp in your blogging and in everything else. Just skip the whole thing if you can.

If you must have bypass surgery, though, you could do a lot worse than have it in Durham Regional Hospital (that is Durham, North Carolina). I was lucky to have fine surgeons, Dr. Charles Murphy and Dr. Thomas Marsicano. And I shall always be grateful for the care and compassion of the nurses and nursing assistants in the chest-pain center on the hospital's fifth floor. These folks were unfailingly kind.

While I'm here, I'll mention one or two points about language.

Terms of endearment

The first one concerns those nurses and nursing assistants. It strikes me that they are among the last groups of people who haven't been intimidated into abandoning terms of endearment. Far too many people, including many writers, shy away from using such terms for fear that the thought police and the language harpies will pounce.

I, for one, am sick of these "politically correct" types.

Yes, of course, it can certainly be inappropriate in writing or speech to use "dear" or "honey" and the like.

But sometimes such terms are quite appropriate. I found it not only endearing but also comforting when the nurses spoke them to me.

I hope that you, as writers--but more important, as human beings--have the judgement to know when to ignore the thought police and the courage not to be cowed.

A foolish word

"Carjacking" is one of the silliest and most annoying words that appear in the media. For one thing, it reeks of the kind of cutesiness that passes for cleverness among hacks. For another thing, it isn't needed. We already had the well-established "hijacking," which covers most situations that involve the forcible taking of a vehicle.

The writer who thinks "carjacking" is clever is only too apt to commit worse folly. Such as the network TV promo I heard the other day that referred to "truckjacking."

Thanks for you patience, and I will try not to wait so long before posting again.

2006-10-26T12:19:00.000-07:00

No surrender

Pam Nelson has a note on her blog lamenting the cave-in by James Kilpatrick on the sloppy use of plural pronouns with singular nouns. Mr. Kilpatrick has given up the fight against using “they” and “their” as pronouns for “everyone.”

But Pam Nelson isn’t ready to surrender. She writes: “As long as we use a singular verb for "everyone," we should use also a singular pronoun.”

I’m with you, Ms. Nelson. We ought not to let sloppy writers win on this.

Yes, usage changes, and yes, this error is widespread. But so are many errors. Sometimes it appears that half the writers in the nation’s papers don’t know when to use “lay” instead of “laid” or why “give the report to Jim and I” is bad grammar.

It’s the job of editors—people who do know grammar, or should—to correct such atrocities, not to accept them because “everybody does it.”

Pardon me if this sounds elitist, but standards of usage and grammar ought to be set and maintained by people who are knowledgeable and competent, not by the lazy, the ignorant and the incompetent.

2006-09-20T12:47:00.000-07:00

Two excellent books for writers

This is a great month for writers. Out this month: two marvelous books, from two of the country’s most eminent writing coaches, Jack Hart and Roy Peter Clark.

I mentioned Mr. Hart’s book, A Writer’s Coach, in the last column. It deserves more than a mention. Mr. Hart has coached writers for years at The Oregonian newspaper, and for part of that time he produced a newsletter called Second Takes for the paper’s staff and freeloaders like me who were lucky enough to get on the mailing list. It was the best newsletter on writing I’ve ever seen. I only wish I had the full collection of issues.

Mr. Hart has taken much of the best advice from Second Takes and put it into A Writer’s Coach. You will find wisdom on every page. Here’s a sample:

Snake Rule No. 1: Direct quotations must appear as separate paragraphs.
Where’d this one come from? True, we create a separate paragraph for the words of each speaker in a dialogue. But what does that have to do with direct quotes?
For the record, no rule dictates that you set off each direct quotation as a separate paragraph. Do so if you want, for emphasis. But if the quote flows naturally from the preceding introductory material, you’d be well advised to leave it in the same paragraph, like this:
Brady leaned into the bar, cranked his head to the right, and spied the bartender twelve stools down. “Bring me a beer and shot,” he bellowed. “I’m not a patient man.”

Hallelujah!

As Mr. Hart says, no rule—none—requires a separate graf for each quote. But most of the newspaper writers and editors I know act as if such a rule existed. Some editors reflexively swing their trusty little copy hatchets and split a dandy paragraph just to get the quote out.

Roy Peter Clark is vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in Florida. He published a series of columns, “Fifty Writing Tools,” on Poynter’s Web site, then gathered them into his book. It is Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer.

Even if you read the columns on the Web site (they are no longer there) and downloaded them, you will want to get the book.
Mr. Clark makes learning not only painless for the reader but also fun. His book is aptly titled: He gives writers tools to use and play with, not stuffy rules to confine them.

Here’s a paragraph I like:

To understand the difference between a good adverb and a bad adverb, consider these two sentences: “She smiled happily" and “She smiled sadly.” Which one works best? The first seems weak because “smiled” contains the meaning of “happily.” On the other hand, “sadly” changes the meaning.
These books are for writers of every sort, not just journalists.
Every writer I know could profit from them.

2006-09-11T16:46:00.000-07:00

Writing before you have a lead

Any number of news writers have convinced themselves that they can’t write unless they have their lead. As long as they labor under that conviction, they handicap themselves.

They struggle and sweat to come up with that perfectly polished first sentence. They waste time and effort that would be better spent getting on with the story—or in planning the story. In many cases, they neglect the planning and con themselves into believing that the story will fall into place once they have the lead.

The lead is important, indeed, vital, but it should be a worry you can deal with later. It shouldn’t be a yawning pit keeping you from beginning to write.

In his splendid new book, A Writer’s Coach, Jack Hart suggests a good method for dealing with the lead barrier. Write a theme statement, he says, and simply start writing from the theme.

It is excellent advice. You should write a theme statement—one sentence giving the gist of the story or article—in any case. Sometimes you will find that the unadorned theme sentence makes a perfectly serviceable lead. Sometimes you will come up with a better lead later. Either way, the theme statement has served its purpose.

Unless you are truly a rare exception, you can teach yourself to write without having the lead. You can learn to see a story or article in parts and start at any part. To do that, though, you must learn to plan the writing. The plan need not be elaborate—a simple list may do.

Once you free yourself from the belief that you can’t write without a lead, you will be a more versatile and more supple writer.

Think of how a movie is made. The director shoots the movie in scenes, but the scenes are not necessarily in sequence. The opening scene may be shot at any point in the process. After the shooting is done, the scenes are put together in the proper sequence to tell a story.

You can do the same thing in writing.

For reporters, especially, the ability to write part of the story has practical benefits. For example, when I was a city editor of a newspaper, I planned election-day coverage to be as painless as possible. I assigned stories to reporters and gave them deadlines and lengths. And I required them to write the bulk of their stories in advance.

Election night can be chaotic. Reporters want to wait till the last minute to get the latest news, but they must meet deadline. It makes no sense for a reporter who has a midnight deadline to wait until 11:45 to start writing his entire story. If he has most of it already written, it is easy to put a top on the piece and send it to the desk.

The material written in advance can include a recap of the campaign, background material on the candidates, a review of the issues, and more. Almost all of this can be cut as necessary if the reporter gets lucky and has time to write fresh material. If he has to go right down to the wire, though, having most of a story in hand relieves him of a lot of pressure.

With an election, you can anticipate the possible outcomes. Someone will emerge as the leader. Or the race will be too tight to call at press time. Or the vote counting may be fouled up and no one has a clue. Whatever the case, you can sum it up in minutes and stick a short top on your prepared story. You can always write a better story for the next edition or the following day’s paper.

Many other situations also call for writing before you know your lead. If you’re covering a major trial, for example, you should start writing your story while the jury is still out. It would be silly to wait until the verdict came in to start.

Sports stories, of course, are obvious candidates for writing before you know what the lead will be.

Writing coach Steve Buttry, who is now director of tailored programs at the American Press Institute, takes the idea a step further. Steve says you should start writing from the beginning, when the story is still at the idea stage, and continue to write in bits in spare moments as you are gathering your material. You might, for example, write a couple of paragraphs after you interview someone. Steve makes good sense. You can read his article here.

The benefits of writing as you report are several. You will save time, because some of the writing will be done earlier. The writing will help you clarify your thinking, pointing you to what else you need for your story.

And it will help you get rid of the crippling notion that you can’t write until you have a lead and everything is all tied up in pretty ribbon.

2006-08-28T18:36:00.000-07:00

In simplicity, power

One of the best writing lessons I ever had came from my first editor, Gene Price of the Goldsboro News-Argus, an afternoon daily in North Carolina.

He told me to read the 23rd Psalm, the one that begins “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Mr. Price wasn’t trying to convert me from my heathen ways. No, he wanted me to see the rhythm and grace of biblical language, how it uses plain words, strong nouns and verbs with a minimum of adjectives and adverbs to paint powerful images.

No doubt about it, the poetry in the Bible is some of the most beautiful language ever penned.

A writer could do a lot worse, whatever his religion, than studying the writing in that book and soaking up its cadences.

Years later, I came across a famous passage from Orwell that reinforces the lesson by way of comparison. Orwell took a verse from Ecclesiastes and rendered it into the mind-numbing mush that passes for writing among bureaucrats and some academicians:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Here’s the passage as it should read:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Beautiful.

That excerpt is from Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” May 1945. If you haven’t read it, or haven’t read it lately, follow the link above. You’ll find that Orwell’s commentary is as fresh and as valid as if it had been written last week.

2006-08-04T18:26:00.000-07:00

Choose your words carefully

Tibor R. Machan, a libertarian philosopher, dissects an Associate Press story that used the phrase “animal rights.” It’s a ridiculous phrase that news people use without thinking, as they do so many terms promoted by people with agendas to push.

Mr. Machan writes:

To say that animals have rights is like saying that animals have guilt, or moral and legal duties, or can engage in insult or commit murder; none of that makes any sense outside of imaginative fiction or fantasy (like that produced by Walt Disney and thousands of children’s book authors). At its best, talk of “animal rights” is moral hype. It involves claiming for animals something that is false so as to bring to light what could in fact be true, namely, that human beings often abuse them, treat them inhumanely. But it is utterly confusing to mistake the hype for truth.

You can read the full article here.

I agree with Mr. Machan. Careful writers should not use the phrase “animal rights” outside quotation marks.

An even more frequently misused term is the word “victim.”

Some reporters routinely use this word to refer to anyone who has been physically hurt.

Let’s say a burglar breaks into a house, intent on robbery, rape and murder. But his prey turns out to be armed and shoots the burglar. The story appears in the newspaper, and the reporter promptly labels the burglar “the victim” merely because he has a gunshot wound.

This kind of writing is–to use Tibor R. Machan’s phrase—journalistic malpractice.

2006-07-24T14:07:00.000-07:00

A tiresome style of writing

A copy editor sent this note:

I've been running into this kind of thing in AP stories, and I find it irritating:

He opened the session by improvising on hymns at the piano and concluded it by accompanying a sing-along on the guitar. In between, he delivered a compelling account of his unlikely conversion from atheism to evangelical Christianity.

The lanky, amiable platform personality wasn’t some traveling revivalist but one of the world’s leading biologists.

I didn't think he was a traveling revivalist; was the writer trying to trick me into thinking he was, so he could surprise me?

Writers who try to mislead the reader in the lead must not realize that the headline, photos and cutlines will already have revealed the "surprise" before the reader even gets to the story.

This was in another AP religion story the other day:

The arena crowd was on its feet, arms in the air, dancing to the lively beat. Colored lights flashed on the performers, who belted out some of their most popular songs.

But these fans weren’t teenagers, and the attraction wasn’t a hot pop act. Two of the four performers, in high-wedge platform sandals and trendy but modest outfits, were obviously pregnant. And many fans were middle-aged men.

How surprising! People besides teenagers go to concerts!

The copy editor is right. This sort of writing is tiresome. It is tiresome not only because of the I-fooled-you gimmickry, but also because of the clichés and because of the empty phrases that the writers assume are descriptive.

Politically correct nonsense

The other day I heard a radio announcer refer to the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor as an “African-American.” I didn’t think the man was an American, so I looked him up.

He was born in England.

The announcer just couldn’t bring himself to say that Coleridge-Taylor was of mixed race, the son of a white woman and a black man.

Timid writers make the same sort of error.

They would do well to heed this thought from Bryan Garner: “In the end, euphemisms leave a linguistic garbage-heap in their wake: once they become standard, they lose their euphemistic quality and must be replaced by newer euphemisms.”

That quotation comes from Mr. Garner’s e-mail newsletter, Garner's Usage Tip of the Day, for Oxford University Press.

2006-07-18T13:34:00.000-07:00

Welcome, Newcomers

A note for newcomers at this site: I’ve just started posting here, and as you can see, I haven’t put up much content yet. But the blog itself isn’t new.

It has existed at another site for more than two years. If you want to read previous notes on writing, you can find them there.

For now, I plan to post the same notes on both sites. This one provides some amenities, such as the ability to post pictures, that aren’t available at the other site or are less easy to use. This site also seems to be less vulnerable to spammers abusing the comments function.

Whichever site you read, welcome.

If you have a question about writing or a suggestion, you’re welcome to e-mail me. Just be sure to put something in the reference line such as “writing question” or “writing coach” so I will know you aren’t a spammer.

2006-07-17T14:49:00.000-07:00

Cure for a hang-up

For a long time I’ve suggested that writers make a reminder sheet for grammar and usage points that give them trouble.

Most of us have some sort of language hang-up. It might be confusion between two soundalikes; it might be trouble with “who” and “whom” or “lay” and “lie.”

A simple reminder sheet—listing examples of right and wrong usage—can save you grief, and if you use it regularly you will probably whip the problem after a time.
Pam Nelson, who writes the Triangle Grammar Guide blog, improves on this idea. She made up a neat visual to show the difference between “peek” and “peak.” Take a look.

By all means, make a graphic if you have the knack, or get an artistic friend to do it.

In any case, do something. You don’t want to keep making the same error.

Be creative and make new errors.

Amateurish narrative

When it is done well, narrative writing is wonderful. A well-done narrative is one of the most compelling stories you can put in a newspaper.

Papers ought to publish more narratives, and they ought to make greater use of narrative techniques to enrich reports that aren’t narratives.

But when narrative techniques are done badly, the result is usually awful. Some writers seem to think that narrative ability is in their genes, and they don’t trouble to learn the skill. They use empty adjectives—purple prose—instead of sharp details. They write tedious leads filled with boring action. They overdo description or insert it so clumsily that the writing shouts “amateur at work.”

The other day, for example, I edited a story that had a sentence describing a woman sitting in her favorite restaurant stirring a multi-colored drink.

That is the kind of detail that interrupts a story unless it is blended in smoothly and contributes something. Even worse, the detail isn’t descriptive—it goes out of its way to avoid description. If the restaurant is pertinent, name it and characterize it in a way that puts the reader in the scene. If the drink is pertinent, name it and name its colors.

While we’re on the subject of using specific details, check out the column headed “Get the name of that bra” on Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools blog.

2006-07-13T17:59:00.000-07:00

It's worse than I thought

Some time ago I mentioned the silliness of using “gate” as a suffix for a word referring to scandal or controversy. As in “Plame-gate” for the controversy over the exposure of Valerie Plame’s job as a CIA agent.

Well, the silliness—no, make that stupidity—is worse than I thought. Pam Robinson, over at the Words at Work blog, has a long and depressing list of examples. Among them: Koreagate, Thatchergate, Dianagate.

And the stupidity has spread around the world. It isn’t just Americans who have airheads in journalism. They are everywhere.

Pam suggests a “complete on pain-of-death ban.”

Ordinarily I’m opposed to capital punishment. But I’m prepared to make an exception.