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Episode 316: Chip Scanlan
241 Plays3 years ago
Chip Scanlan returns to talk about his new book 33 Ways to Not Screw Up Your Journalism. Support: patreon.com/cnfpod
Sponsor: Athletic Greens
Social: @CNFPod
Newsletter: brendanomeara.com
Recommended
Transcript
Articles vs. Stories
00:00:00
Speaker
Here's tell me an article, Daddy. Story. It's a word that echoes in newsrooms every day. Great story today. Where's that story? You're 30 minutes late. Hey, boss, I need another day, week, month to finish that story. How the heck did that story get on the front page? This always refers to another journalist's work. And the old standby, story at 11.
00:00:25
Speaker
We call them stories, but most of what appears in print, online, and broadcast are articles or reports, says writing teacher Jack Hart. So here's an example of an article from The Guardian about the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
00:00:41
Speaker
Fierce fighting broke out in Kiev as Russian forces tried to push their way towards the city center from multiple directions in the early hours of Saturday. And as the Ukrainian president, Vladimir Zelensky, bluntly rejected a U.S. offer to evacuate him from the country's capital.
00:01:02
Speaker
Articles present information about an accident, a public meeting, a speech, a contested presidential election, or even a war. They're a convenient way to convey information in a clear, concise, accurate fashion told in a neutral voice. But please, let's not confuse them with stories.
00:01:21
Speaker
A story features characters rather than sources and communicates experience through the five senses and a few others, place, time, and most of all drama.
Impact of Storytelling
00:01:32
Speaker
It has a beginning that grabs a reader's attention, a middle that keeps the reader engaged, and an ender that lingers. Scenes peppered with dialogue and a distinct voice drive the action.
00:01:44
Speaker
Here's how Mitchell S. Jackson opened 12 Seconds and a Life, his Runner's World story about the murder of Ahmed Aubrey, a black man by three white men in 2020 while jogging through the suburban Georgia neighborhood.
00:02:00
Speaker
Imagine young Ahmad Maud Arbery, a junior varsity scat-back turned undersized varsity linebacker, on a practice field of the Brunswick High Pirates. The head coach has divided the squad
00:02:16
Speaker
into offense and defense and has his offense running the plays of their next opponent. The coach, as is his habit, has been taunting his defense. You all ain't ready, he says. You can't stop us, he says. What you all gonna do?
00:02:32
Speaker
The next play, Maud, all five feet, 10 inches, and 165 pounds of him, bursts between blockers and boom, lays a hit that makes the sound of cars crashing, that echoes across the field and into the stands that just might reach the locker room. And that story won Jackson the 2021 Pulitzer Prize and, believe it or not, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing.
00:03:02
Speaker
Journalists must be able to write articles and stories. Each has their own challenges. Articles compress events and focus on newsworthy elements. Narratives connect us with the universals of the human condition.
Finding Drama in Mundanity
00:03:15
Speaker
They matter because they transport us to different worlds that reveal the personal and emotional realities behind the news. We need stories, nonfiction author Bill Buford wrote in the 1996 essay because, quote, they are a fundamental unit of knowledge, the foundation of memory.
00:03:35
Speaker
essential to the way we make sense of our lives, the beginning, middle, and end of our personal and collective trajectories, because it is impossible to live without them. Articles have their place, but late at night, your child will never say, I can't sleep. Tell me an article, Daddy.
00:03:56
Speaker
No, they beg to be lulled into slumber by a story. Instead, in much of news writing, we provide few, if any, of these. Instead of settings, we give readers an address. Instead of characters, we give people stick figures. Goldilocks, seven, of 56, 24, sold them away. Instead of suspense, we give away at the ending, at the beginning, using the inverted pyramid, the form which presents newsworthy elements in descending order and peters out at the end.
00:04:25
Speaker
The challenge for today's journalists is to use literary techniques to write true stories. That is, Joel Rawson, my former editor at the Providence Journal Describe It, revealed the, quote, joys and costs of being human.
00:04:39
Speaker
And here are some tips. Newspapers are full of stories waiting to be told. Police briefs, classified ads, obituaries, the last two paragraphs of a city council story, all may hold the promise of a dramatic story.
Journalistic Writing Advice from Chip Scanlan
00:04:54
Speaker
So mind your paper or your website for story ideas. Find the extraordinary in the ordinary stuff of life. Graduations, reunions, burials, buying a car,
00:05:05
Speaker
putting mom in a nursing home, or the day dad comes to live with his children. Change your point of view. Write the City Council story through the eyes of the Asian American who asked for better police protection in this neighborhood. Study examples of outstanding narrative non-fiction on the Pulitzer Prize sites, the National Magazine Award site, the News Leaders Association, and Neiman Storyboard sites.
00:05:31
Speaker
and look for ways to drop storytelling features in your daily articles, whether it's just a description, a little scene, a snatch of dialogue. And I really appreciate you letting me read that. Well, that was a different way to open up the show. That's Chip Scanlon, whose latest book is 33 ways not to screw up your journalism.
00:06:01
Speaker
It'll be out mid-June-ish. It's a snappy little read that addresses a lot of common pitfalls many cub and seasoned reporters face and help us to address them. He addresses the reputation many reporters have of not being human, bloated quotes, bad attitudes, failing to listen, and that little voice inside your head that says, You suck! What?
00:06:30
Speaker
What was that? You suck. Wait a minute. That's coming from inside my head. This is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories.
Relationships in Journalism
00:06:43
Speaker
I'm Brendan O'Mara. How's it going?
00:06:46
Speaker
want to remind you to keep the conversation going on twitter at cnfpod or instagram creative non-fiction podcast you can support the podcast by becoming a paid member at patreon.com slash cnfpod as i say the show is free but it sure as hell ain't cheap members get transcripts chances to ask questions to future guests
00:07:04
Speaker
And I give away some cool stuff sometimes. If this book proposal I'm waiting to hear back on sells, you better believe I'll be sharing it with you. And if it doesn't sell, pie to the face. Also, this episode, and for the next seven or eight, there'll be a mid-roll ad. If you don't want to hear that ad in the middle of the show, I'm dropping the file ad free for all patrons on the Patreon page. Yet another wickedly exciting perk.
00:07:33
Speaker
Free ways to support the show you can always leave a kind review or rating on Apple podcasts or Spotify Hell it doesn't even have to be kind they're the best ones but you know if you're if you're feeling like I'm a Piece of shit asshole and you want to say one star piece of shit asshole Go for it, and I might even read it right here. You know why not?
00:07:56
Speaker
You know, this, we're not monsters here, but I've got a five-star one here from someone whose handle is, um, me, titled, Excellent Guests, Great Questions. Okay, I'll start with this. I don't love the music, and I fast-forward through a lot of the hosts' chatter at the beginning. Sorry, but that's easy to do, and the lineup of guests and topics hits so many points of interest for me, and Brendan's passion and persistent, thoughtful questions draw them out so well.
00:08:26
Speaker
that I find myself looking for another segment to listen to as soon as I finish one. It's a masterclass in non-fiction writing.
00:08:35
Speaker
Wouldn't you know that I got hung up on the chatter part of this review? No matter. I suspect this person, whoever he or she or they may be, has already skipped through this part. But it's still an amazing five-star review. And if you leave one, I will read it right here in the chatter section. Be sure to head over to BrendanOmera.com for show notes and to sign up for my up to 11 rage against the algorithm, CNF and monthly newsletter, first of the month, no spam. So far as I can tell, you can't beat it.
00:09:06
Speaker
Okay, so Chip is here. He's at Chip Scanlon on Twitter. I recommend his newsletter for writing tips and inspiration. You can even listen back to episode... Oh, excuse me. Episode 292, when his other book, Writers on Writing, came out. So let's just get to it, CNF-ers. Okay, here's Chip Scanlon, all right?
00:09:43
Speaker
I'm going to be talking to Howard Bryant soon because he's got a biography on Ricky Henderson coming out. So in my research with him, yeah, he wrote a great introductory essay because he was the guest editor for the 2017 volume of Best American Sports Writing.
00:09:59
Speaker
And in that introductory essay, he writes just a lot about journalism as craft and how difficult it is in this era. So some of my notes there I think are really sort of germane to what our conversation will be. And specifically, one thing that he cites was that journalism is a game of facts, but also one of relationships. And I think that's something that you can speak to well about
00:10:24
Speaker
Reporters being being human which is something that you touch upon in the 33 tips to to be better So maybe you can speak to that about you know journalism being you know We're not robots or humans and it is about relationships as much it is as much as it is about facts Yeah, I decided to lead off 33 ways not to screw up your journalism with being in human one of the it's not a conceit but one of the things is the chapter headings have to be the screw-up of
00:10:52
Speaker
And the chapters themselves have to be the solution. So people might read 33 Ways Not to Screw Up Journalism, Being Inhuman. Wait, that doesn't sound like it until they read the chapter. But yeah, you know, what really struck me about that chapter was Lindsay Adario of the New York Times.
00:11:15
Speaker
photographer from the New York Times who took that awesome and tragic photo of that poor woman and her children and the volunteer who were trying to get them across a bridge to safety.
00:11:29
Speaker
the Russians shelled them to death. She reached out, they found, the husband had been away caring for an ailing mother and they reached out to him and he said he was coming back to see, the bodies had already been identified but he was coming back to see his family.
00:11:49
Speaker
his wife and his son and his daughter. And she decided she and her colleagues decided they were not going to go with him. They were not going to be there for that. They felt that was an intensely private moment that they did not want to intrude on. And instead, what they did was they stayed away. And then he came back
00:12:13
Speaker
and gave them this very long and detailed interview that basically told the story of their lives and deaths. And so the idea of every encounter as a journalist is a way to form a relationship, no matter how brief. I think about the Surfside collapse in Florida and all the people there.
00:12:43
Speaker
I know that there are reporters, probably from the Miami Herald, because it's a great paper and they're full of terrific journalists, that didn't put off the survivors, did not make the survivors feel they were being, you know, disrespected, but instead, you know, reached out to them. And I always say, be unfailingly polite. Be almost gentle in your approach.
00:13:11
Speaker
Yeah, so I just know that they, you know, while some, some journalists, and I think of them as prosecutors, when they interview, that they fail. And the journalists that the don't fail are the ones who, who recognize that they are encountering human beings, and do their best to treat them as human beings and be human beings. My original title for that chapter was actually creeps with notepads.
00:13:41
Speaker
which is actually a line in a chapter. But there's another thing about relationships, and this was interesting. I've actually given this presentation to three colleges, to Duke, to Washington Lee University, and the Harvard Extension School. And it's about counterphobia, or rather doing what you fear. And that has to do with relationships, too,
00:14:11
Speaker
One of the things I encountered when I ran a summer program for college students at the Poynter Institute was they were terrified of encountering strangers. And so I was, in a sense, it's one of the reasons that one student called it, and it was quoted in Washington journalism when you called it a boot camp. The very first day I said, okay, here's your assignment.
00:14:38
Speaker
You've got notepads. We've given you notepads with Porter logos and you've got a Porter pen and your assignment is to go out and find five strangers, introduce yourself, get their name and their address. And if you can
Journalistic Confidence and Connection
00:14:56
Speaker
get their age, some people are sensitive about that and ask them their comment on whatever story was hot that day. And I'll never forget because Steve Myers,
00:15:08
Speaker
said he started out with a nausea in the pit of his stomach. But by the time he had finished knocking on every door on 54th Street, he knew he could do it. And Steve Myers went on to work for the New Orleans Times Picayune, was an investigations editor at USA Today.
00:15:32
Speaker
And it's now an investigations, a regional investigations editor at ProPublica. And I'm not saying he's those things because I told him to do that. But because he's an incredibly smart and talented guy. But the fact was, he was like everybody else in that class. And like these students that I've encountered, teachers tell me, my students are afraid to go out and talk to people.
00:16:02
Speaker
at every one of these places. At the Harvard Extension School, I wasn't dealing with college kids. I was dealing with, in some cases, middle-aged people who said the same thing. So it's so important to see journalism as a
00:16:23
Speaker
as a field built on relationships. And I think it's such a great question, Brendan, because I think that's what it's all about. It's creating very quickly and having created very quickly a relationship with someone so that they will tell you what's on their mind. And if you're lucky, what's in their heart.
00:16:42
Speaker
Yeah, getting to the point of having some degree of confidence or comfort with being uncomfortable and approaching strangers and approaching people who might be experiencing some degree of trauma and you know that it's incumbent upon you to cover it sensitively.
00:17:01
Speaker
But I think it's just like what Debbie Millman sometimes says is that when you first start driving, you don't have car confidence yet. You're a bit tentative. Certain things don't come to second nature. And then over time, the more and more you drive, the more things become second nature, and you can do it. So I think it's a lot like this. The more and more you can talk to strangers and do it, like you say, being unfailingly polite, especially in
00:17:31
Speaker
with sensitive subject matters is that over time it's like, okay, it is a muscle and you become more confident and you become more skilled at being able to broach the conversations and then just talk to people with an empathetic ear to be able to tell these very human stories. But it starts with that fear and then you work through it and you build that confidence. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. That definitely came to me because I was terrified.
00:18:00
Speaker
And the reason I was able to write that chapter called Letting Fear Stop You was that, you know, on my first journalism job, I had no experience. I had no clips. I had no journalism training. I wanted to be a rich, famous novelist, but I could never find the help one of that and said, help rich, famous novelists, we'll train, you know? So I became an accidental journalist and, you know,
00:18:29
Speaker
hostile cops, you know, suspicious people at town meetings, you know, complete strangers on a feature. I was terrified. And so when I did go to journalism, and my teacher said, just as an aside, if you want to be a journalist,
00:18:53
Speaker
you have to be counter-phobic. And my hand just shot up. I said, what does that mean? And he said, do what you fear. And Professor Mentor was his name, and he remains at 95 a mentor to me. He really struck a nerve.
00:19:10
Speaker
And I have to tell you, Monica Hess, and this is a few years back, but I don't think the situation's changed. She's a columnist for The Washington Post, and she tweeted, and I plucked it out and I put it in the book. She said, you know, I don't think most people realize how horrifically, painfully shy most reporters are. Yeah, she was on a campaign, she was on a presidential campaign trail, and she said,
00:19:37
Speaker
I give myself an M&M for every human being I interview. Oh, this episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. Listen, you've probably heard of these guys and I have yet to try this product, but what I dig about them is that they're plant-based, which is important to me. Otherwise, this would be a non-starter. With one delicious scoop you get 75. Wow.
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00:21:17
Speaker
And, you know, I think of Joe Drape, too, who is, you know, he cut his teeth as I forget where exactly he writes. He covers sports for New York Times. He's been doing that since 98. But at a newspaper, he cut his teeth out. It might have been in Texas. I think he.
00:21:35
Speaker
Oh jeez, I think it was on Mother's Day like the the mother's son had like or Children our child had died in a car accident and he was tasked with like having to go on Mother's Day to like interview the parents about this and he was just kind of like shit in his pants about it and how am I gonna do this how am I gonna do this but when he got to the door like he was
00:21:57
Speaker
amazed that they really wanted to talk about you know their their childhood they just lost and it and it kind of broke down that wall that was like okay maybe I don't have to be as as timid about this most people do want to talk even if it's very very sensitive yeah I'm not exactly sure what chapter it is but I had a similar experience
00:22:22
Speaker
My father died when I was 10. And he was 46. And he left six kids and a 42 year old widow and a pile of unpaid debts. And, you know, it's, I was communicating with someone who lost a father at that age. And he was talking about how it really marks you. And I said, you know, it marks you stronger than a tattoo. And so
00:22:46
Speaker
At one point, if you had asked me at the Providence Journal, for example, where I worked for eight years, what my beat was, I would have replied, death. Because if a kid was run over by a school bus, if a girl walking across a runaway, walking across a train trestle, had her leg cut off, it was like, where's Chip, you know?
00:23:10
Speaker
And they sent me because I got the stories. And one of the reasons I got the stories was I always shared with them pretty quickly that I had lost my father when I was a kid. And I wasn't trying to snow them. I just wanted them to know that I did have some experience with this. So this one time,
00:23:40
Speaker
This poor young woman gets caught in a crossfire between the cops and a runaway parolee. I mean, it was ridiculous. And she gets killed. And of course, Chip,
00:23:57
Speaker
We need a Sunday takeout on it, on her life and her death. It's like, oh my God, I've got the knot in my stomach. And, you know, I'm just dreading and wishing there was some way I could not go to the front door. And I got to the front door and suddenly, you know, and this is, is epiphanic.
00:24:22
Speaker
An adjective? It is right now. In an empathetic moment, when the father answered the door, I said, Hi, I'm Chip Scanlan. I'm a reporter with the Providence Journal. And I just wanted you to know we're writing a story about what happened to your daughter. And I didn't want you to pick up the paper Sunday and ask, well, couldn't Dave at least asked if we wanted to say something?
00:24:49
Speaker
And within minutes, I'm in, they've taken me into the young woman's bedroom, their daughter's bedroom. And there on the bed is, you know, copper, copperware that she's I'm sorry, I forgot to say she was engaged to be married. And there is copperware that she's just received. And there is her hope chest opened up. And
00:25:15
Speaker
you know, in only the way a journalist can say about a tragic, tragic story, it was a really good story. You know, you're embarrassed saying that. But, you know, when you get the kind of intimate
00:25:30
Speaker
details about someone, it does make for a good story. A story that you hope connects with people and isn't sensational, but makes you feel the tragedy of this and the loss and just the heartache.
00:25:48
Speaker
Yeah, I like that you write in the book that talent may open the door, but attitude gets you inside the room. So what is it about attitude, especially when a lot of reporters are kind of overworked, they're tired, bitter about just their standing, whether it be in the newsroom or just industry in general. How can we control and maybe have a better attitude and bring that to the work?
00:26:16
Speaker
There's something called the ladder of abstraction. The guy named S.I. Hayakawa talked about it in the thirties. He was a linguist. And basically he said all thought, language and experience can be grouped on a ladder of abstraction. At the top is the abstract world. At the bottom is the concrete world. As a writer, I'm drawn to the bottom. So the story I'll talk about is David Marinus. Okay, David Marinus.
00:26:43
Speaker
is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, several-time bestselling novelist, associate editor at the Washington Post. And in 1996, some big officials in the Secretary of State were killed in a plane crash, and I think it was in Bosnia. And he volunteered to go to Dover Air Force Base and to see
00:27:12
Speaker
the arrival of the bodies. And he said that's what he would do. He would work on projects. He would work on books at the Post. But whenever something big broke, he always said, hey, if you need any help, I'm here to pitch in. What do you need? I'll pitch in. And so in this case, pitching in meant he got pneumonia because it was raining.
00:27:41
Speaker
He got pneumonia. He also won $10,000 for the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for, Jesse Laventhall Award for Deadline Reporting. But he just demonstrated and he said, you know, a lot of reporters, they kind of clash with their editors about this stuff. And he said, I find when I offer to help that there's a fair exchange. They give me, I give them something, they give me space.
00:28:12
Speaker
And I think, you know, and I had bad attitudes, certainly, you know, depending on the editor or the paper I was at, I had, there were times in my career of 22 years where I had a bad attitude.
Creativity and Proactivity in Reporting
00:28:28
Speaker
And it had to do with, again, relationships, a relationship with an editor. But I did find that when,
00:28:39
Speaker
I embraced the idea that, hey, come in. I think my editor, Joel Ross, has said, look, just come in, not with a smile, but come in ready to do the work. That's all we ask. Just come in ready to do the work.
00:28:56
Speaker
And you know, that's really the only attitude a journalist needs is I'm ready to do the work, you know, I hope I can do it. Well, you know, I don't know if I will do it. Well, I have no idea. You know, my confidence level today is really low, but I'm ready to do the work. And with that kind of attitude, I think you're going to shine, you know, they're going to start saying, you know,
00:29:26
Speaker
this person is really here for us. And he's not like the one sitting at the desk next to him, which or her with the sour puss, you know, and saying, you know, my editors suck, I don't get any good assignments, you know, they cut my copy all the time. You know, instead, that's the person that they're going to go the extra mile for, I think. So that's why I say, you know, you know, town is one thing, but
00:29:55
Speaker
It's attitude. It's attitude that matters, I think, more than talent. I really do.
00:30:01
Speaker
Yeah, no, I agree. I think it's in any field or whatever, you're going to deal with so many headaches that just come with the day-to-day grind of things. So it's a matter of reframing things in your head to just get like, oh, this is something that I get to do versus something that I have to do. Those kind of little Jedi mind tricks that you can play on your own.
00:30:28
Speaker
on your own brain and I think maybe reporters these days need that more than ever because it can be hard to sometimes get up and have to churn out so many stories a day and it feels like you're not making any degree of headway or impact. So maybe with that said, and you've already kind of alluded to it, it's like how can reporters maybe glean a bit more satisfaction from their day-to-day work?
00:30:56
Speaker
I think, you know, one of the chapters is called Missing Multimedia. And it's, it basically begins with the story of Peter Badia, who when he was starting out as a reporter, all he needed was a notebook and a pen with a good pencil with a good eraser. And this was in the 70s. Today, he's the editor of the Detroit News. He's been the editor in Cincinnati.
00:31:24
Speaker
He's a big editor at the Oregonian. He's a terrific editor. He's a terrific guy. And, you know, he says nothing makes him happier now than seeing one of his reporters live streaming from Michigan Stadium. And so I think one of the ways is is to kind of is to think as creatively as possible is to say, OK, look, they're really giving me boring stuff to do.
00:31:53
Speaker
But if I can come up with something exciting for them, if I can actually try, you know, you're talking about Jedi mind tricks, if I can kind of figure out what is it that they want, you know, what is it that they really want? Okay, if they want four stories a day, well, okay. Oh, I never had to do that. I don't know how people do it. It can't be done very well.
00:32:23
Speaker
And to be honest, if you're in a place where they're demanding four stories a day, and you're not being professionally and personally satisfied, my advice is to quit and go someplace else. Yeah. You know, it's like, you should not have to subject yourself to that. Because you should be in a place where, okay, I'm going to give you what you want.
00:32:53
Speaker
But I want to know what you need. And I want to tell you what I need to do. And I think I think it's about communication. You know, the thing is, journalism is about communication and journalists suck at communicating. They really do. They don't communicate with their editors. Well, editors don't communicate with reporters. Well,
00:33:17
Speaker
But in terms of story craft too, I like the part where you talk about focus and organizing. So maybe when you're dealing with a longer story, and these are things that I love talking about on this show too, is how can people be better at honing their focus on their stories and then going about organizing their notes and their transcripts and everything so that they can execute the best possible story?
00:33:42
Speaker
Yeah, sure. That's a great question and one that I really like talking about because I have the great fortune of doing annotations for Neiman storyboard where I get to interview pro-publica writers, you know, New York Times writers, New Yorker writers about their long form work. But yeah, focus. I won't get the quote
00:34:08
Speaker
I might get the quote straight, but Tom Boswell, the sports writer, longtime sports writer at the Washington Post said, you know, you have to have a theme. You know, a story is like a necklace. The pearls may seem very flashy. The thread may seem very dull, but it's the thread that makes the necklace. And the thread is the focus.
00:34:39
Speaker
I have five questions and four of which I gleaned from David Von Draley, the Washington Post, that I think you can actually find your focus in 75 seconds if you're familiar and comfortable with free writing, just blasting on a computer. And they are, what's the news? What's the story? Why does it matter?
00:35:04
Speaker
What does it say about life, about the world, about the times we live in? And what is my story about in one word? What is it really about in one word? Not zoning, but corruption, or not healthcare, but about
00:35:29
Speaker
choices. And in this case, you try to go as high up the ladder of abstraction as you can to choose the universal themes. In terms of organizing, I just interviewed Rachel Aviv of The New Yorker. Yeah, boy, that was a real gift.
00:35:57
Speaker
the shadow penal system for struggling kids, which opens with this 15 year old girl named Emma Burris being wakened up in the middle of the night by a six and a half foot tall guy with juvenile transport agent on the back of his shirt. And he tells her to get up, get dressed. And we're leaving. And her adoptive parents are standing at the door and they basically booted her out into this
00:36:26
Speaker
teen challenge institution. And they're, they're all over the country. And the way a V describes it, it's the abuse, in many cases, echoes Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. And so I said to her, how do you organize all your stuff? She said, I use Scrivener.
00:36:53
Speaker
Are you familiar with Scribner? I used it for this book, and I was warned, oh, it has this really steep learning curve, but it's full of videos. But that's a tool. I mean, in terms of an approach to organizing, you know, a general wouldn't go into battle without a plan.
00:37:15
Speaker
a builder wouldn't start a house without a blueprint. But journalists start stories without any clue what the beginning is, what the end is, what the middle might be.
Writing Process and Structure
00:37:28
Speaker
And I think you really, no matter how you do it, whether you write, whether you, you know, on deadline lists, three to five most important things you want to say in the story and the order of which you want to say them, or you use whiteboards, or you use note
00:37:44
Speaker
cards like screenwriters do. But you have to plan. And if you don't plan, the story will suffer because there's a good chance you will bury the lead, the middle will be a muddle, and the ending will just peter out. Organization, you know, it was Don Murray, the late writing coach, and who was my mentor and best friend for 25 years,
00:38:12
Speaker
You know, he was the one who taught me the writing process, you know. I grew up thinking writing, reading novels and wanting to be a rich, famous novelist and thinking, I was screwed because these people were geniuses. They were magicians. How did they produce eight out of word books? And all the words were spelled right. And it kept me awake. Sneak reading. You know, three nights in a row when I was 12 years old, you know, that's what my daughter called it. I was, why are you so tired, Liana? I was sneak reading.
00:38:42
Speaker
Donald Murray shows up in 1981 at the Providence Journal Bulletin where I'm a staff writer, my first newspaper with an elevator, which is how I delineate my career. Okay. Cause I, cause I'd been to J school finally and I had some clips and he shows up as our writing coach and I was lucky enough to get invited to be part of the first seminar.
00:39:07
Speaker
And we were in the publisher's room, the publisher's office or whatever you call it, with the long, the huge long gleaming mahogany dangle, you know, where the wise sages, you know, for the Providence Journal, basically, wrote right wing editorials. And he said, writing may be magical, but it is not magic.
00:39:30
Speaker
It is a rational process, a series of decisions and steps that every writer takes and makes and takes, no matter the genre, the length, or the deadline. And I'm like, give me the paper. I'm writing. I'm scribbling as fast as I can because what he was telling me was I didn't have to be a magician. I just had to know that
00:39:56
Speaker
You begin with an idea or an assignment. You go out and you begin to collect information. You report. And then you have this massive information and you're kind of lost in it. And you have to focus. You have to find out what is the asset, what is the kernel, what is the theme, what is Tom Boswell's thread on the jewelry necklace, on the necklace. And then you have to organize. And then you draft.
00:40:26
Speaker
And, you know, for someone who basically sat at a typewriter, just banged away, trying to come up with something, this was just unheard of. That you mean, you actually do these things in kind of an order? You don't just start writing? And then he said, so you organize, you draft, and then you revise. But he said, this process is recursive.
00:40:53
Speaker
that you're always circling back. And you know this, you know, you're always circling back, you know, you've got to go, wait a minute, I've got a hole in this reporting, I got to go back out. I got to call that person back up. You know what I mean? Yeah, you just you just have to keep circling back. And so, you know, that for me was the most that was the single most important element of my education as a writer.
00:41:22
Speaker
And to that point you saying of like going back out or making that call. You make a point in this book too of doing a lot of things if you can face to face which is something that in a digital era where a lot of us are so digitally tethered and it's very easy to
00:41:39
Speaker
DM people and email people and to a lesser text people to a lesser extent even phone calls But having those interactions voice to voice face to face is a almost a lost art now And so I like hearing you say like go back out for more information Yeah, you know Jeff Edgers who's the He's either the rock critic or the pot I don't think he's a music critic for The Washington Post
00:42:07
Speaker
He refuses to do email interviews with recording artists. Yeah. He just refuses. He will not do email interviews. You know, you want a story in the post? You've got to come talk. I got to come talk to you. The thing is reporters, one of the things reporters don't realize is how much power they have because between the time they get an assignment or
00:42:34
Speaker
an assignment, an idea of theirs is approved. And the time the editor gets their copy, the editor is powerless. And so what's to keep you from just hitting the bricks, getting in your car, going someplace, meeting somebody at a Starbucks, you know, 10 minutes from the office, nothing. It's just, it's,
00:43:01
Speaker
It's entropy, if that's the correct word. It may not be, but since I came up with epiphanic, who knows? I think it is entropy. And journalistic entropy, that'd be the 34th way to screw up your journalism. Pure chaos, journalistic entropy. Journalistic entropy, yeah. I mean, it's easy to sit in your chair.
00:43:28
Speaker
You know, it's easy to DM, and it's easy to email. And, of course, sometimes you have to. You know, sometimes you have no choice but to Zoom. There's just no other way. And, of course, during COVID, during the pandemic, the heart of the pandemic, during lockdown, and who knows what's going to happen coming up? We don't know. There was no choice. You know, José de Real of The Washington Post, who's another person I feature in the book, you know,
00:43:58
Speaker
He was locked down. But he wanted to do a story about families dealing with a family member who had bought into conspiracy theories. So he just, you know, he's in his 30s. So he's a digital native. And so he just, with his magic fingers, just found this family eventually. And the mother had bought into QAnon.
00:44:28
Speaker
And he did that story with emails and texts and phone calls. And it was a brilliant story. He eventually even got the mother to talk, which to me is an astonishing achievement. But then the lockdown lifted. And so he went back where he should have been out in the field. And the next story,
00:44:56
Speaker
I did an annotation with him about this story. The next thing I know he tells me, I'm headed to California, man. I'm going out. Maybe you can't be as lucky as to head to California, but there's nothing that says between the time you get the assignment and the time you hand the story in that you cannot leave the building.
00:45:23
Speaker
You know, I mean, there are editors who feel more comfortable seeing bodies in, you know, in chairs and maybe might be be frightened by the notion of an empty newsroom.
Overcoming the Inner Critic
00:45:38
Speaker
But I mean, there were times with that summer program
00:45:43
Speaker
that boot camp I ran. If I came into the newsroom and they weren't writing, I was not very polite. I said, get the hell out of here. What are you doing? Get out of here. Get out of here. You've got beats. You've got community beats. Get out there. That's what editors should be screaming.
00:46:08
Speaker
at people sitting in their chairs. And bad on them if they're not. But if they're not, there's no reason that you can't do it. And there's no reason that you shouldn't do it. Not if you want the kind of stories that you're talking about. I think you need to talk about the radio station You Suck FM. Oh, You Suck FM. Thank you. That name came from a Los Angeles Times editor
00:46:38
Speaker
who when I told this story, I said, you know how it is? You got your fingers at the keyboard, you're just about ready to write, and you hear this whisper, you suck. What? What was that? You suck. Wait a minute. That's coming from inside my head. You suck. Wait a minute. I don't suck. I had that story. Yeah, I know you had this story yesterday, but you've lost it. You've lost it. You didn't have any talent to begin with. You suck.
00:47:07
Speaker
And I told this in so many seminars that people just cracked up because they all recognized it, you know, and I have to admit I'm, I'm a profane. I'm an ex. I'm no, I'm not an ex. I am a profane ex golf caddy who was taught to curse by angry golfers and a profane ex newspaper reporter who was taught to curse even better in newsrooms.
00:47:37
Speaker
So, you know, my voice says, you suck. And one time, I bet the LA Times doing a seminar, they said, it goes, Oh, yes, it's like, I know what you mean. It's like a radio station playing in your head. I said, Oh, my God, you suck FM. And, and I said, we should have a playlist. And the first song should be Soy on Peridor by Beck.
00:48:03
Speaker
You know, I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me? And, but to be a little more, a little less profane, Sigmund Freud said, not to me of course, but in the interpretation of dreams, he talked about a letter he received from the composer August Schiller, who was writing to a friend who was blocked
00:48:32
Speaker
And he said, essentially, there is a watcher at the gate in your mind. And that watcher is preventing you from your creative thoughts getting past.
00:48:50
Speaker
And it wasn't Margaret Atwood, and I'm blanking. It might be Margaret Atwood. No, it's not Margaret Atwood. I'm blanking on who it was. But if you Google, watch her at the gates, and everybody should Google, watch her at the gate, because they'll come up with this terrific essay by this writer. And I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember her name. But you'll find that an essay about it, because
00:49:17
Speaker
she describes the watcher at her gate. And the whole idea of You Suck FM is to sensitize people to the idea that they have this inner critic, you know, and how do you get past it? Well, the way you get past it is, what I say is, lower your standards. And people are like, what?
00:49:40
Speaker
In fact, I don't just lower my standards, folks. I abandon them. I try to write as badly as possible. Because first of all, just as you can't sit down and write a Pulitzer Prize-winning story, you can't sit down and consciously write a terrible story, I don't think. So when my fingers are paused over the keyboard, they start flying. And I start with,
00:50:07
Speaker
Oh man, I'm so burned out. I'm so tired. My eyes are burning. I don't have anything to write. I have nothing to say and there's nothing. You know what I was just thinking about? I remember when I was 12 years old and my grandfather, Baba, lived in the bachelor's quarters of the YMCA in Greenwich, Connecticut.
00:50:31
Speaker
a Jehovah's Witness who used to steal his ties and he had a steamer trunk with all his belongings and I would deliver my newspapers and then go visit him and I would he was about six feet three or so and I was about four feet tall but I would stand on the tips of his
00:50:56
Speaker
of his, I don't know if they were bros or what they were, but they were, you know, black leather shoes and take his hands and lift them up out of his chair. And this is what's out on the screen now. And I'm saying to myself, holy shit. Like I said, I'm profane. I've got a story here. This is a story here that I had no idea was gonna come from. I had no idea it was gonna come. But by just lowering my standards,
00:51:25
Speaker
letting the gate lift, silencing the inner critic, letting the creative mind flower. That's how you produce, I think, well, at least drafts that sometimes you create great stuff off the bat.
00:51:49
Speaker
But generally speaking, you create drafts that you can revise and revise and revise because writing is all about one thing, as you know, Brendan, writing is about revision, about revision.
Power of Listening in Journalism
00:52:01
Speaker
And that's you. Again, I hope that's I hope that's told the story of You Suck FM. I invite people to tune in and then tune out.
00:52:12
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That radio station has played in my head for decades, so I'm very aware of it, independent of writing. It was just there and myriad forms. And yeah, so I can relate to that.
00:52:31
Speaker
But I think, to your point too, just to generate these stories, of course, you have to be a good curator and a good gatherer of information. If you've ever been in a press pool or a big press conference, one thing that I've always noticed was how verbose a lot of reporters are, and their questions are very, very long-winded.
00:52:58
Speaker
because they want to just flex how intelligent they are and they invariably almost never ask a question anyway. But I think this gets to a point of it's not that it's not just asking good questions is actually being a good listener and there's a point where you write just like just shut up.
00:53:15
Speaker
And I loved seeing that because so often, I'm not shutting up right now, but it's one of those things where, you know, try to ask the question and get out of the way, and it's okay to look like an idiot. Just shut up.
00:53:30
Speaker
Yeah, you know, Barack Obama once did ask a reporter, is there a question there? Is there a question in there? I've been at some of those press conferences, not presidential, but certainly, you know, health and human services, you know, those type.
00:53:49
Speaker
And I've watched enough and studied enough presidential press conferences to know that, and having been in Washington for five years, I understand you get up, he's called on you, and you've got one chance. And you think, well, I've only got one chance, so I better ask four questions. Instead of doing what every interviewer has to do, which is first of all,
00:54:17
Speaker
write the question, script it, make sure it's open-ended, begins with how, why, where, what, and because those are conversation starters, and you script it and you deliver it.
00:54:36
Speaker
verbatim, and then you shut up. Or another way you could say it is S-T-F-U. But I reference Robert Caro, who has been writing these magisterial biographies of Lyndon Baines Johnson.
00:54:59
Speaker
a notoriously and understandably private man giving his corrupt nature. He's gotten these people, these taciturn and closed-mouth Texans and Washington insiders to tell him stuff that make his books just astonishing discoveries.
00:55:25
Speaker
And he talks about, he says, I tell myself inside my head, shut up. And I also write it in my notebook. And if anybody went through my notepads, they would see over and over SU, SU, SU, SU.
00:55:42
Speaker
just ask one question and shut up. And if you have a problem with that, and I know a lot of reporters do because in the same way that they're afraid of strangers, they're afraid of silence. And they have to understand is everyone is afraid of silence. Everyone is, you know, it hangs between us, you know, and we rush to fill it. And
00:56:10
Speaker
It may be a little, I can't think of the word, but.
00:56:17
Speaker
It sounds a little manipulative, but it's a professional habit that you ask a question and you be quiet because a couple of things happen. First of all, you should count to 10 inside your head. If you have a problem with it, you should just inside count to 10, even if your stomach is aching because you're so terrified.
00:56:46
Speaker
people cannot abide silence. And two things will happen. Your source will rush in to fill the silence. And that's of course good because you get stuff you can quote. But more importantly, and I think this is the singular most important aspect of this idea of shutting up is that people say, you know what? This person wants to listen to me. Yeah.
00:57:13
Speaker
I'm used to people jumping on me, jumping on my words as soon as I say something. You do a couple of those questions and you signal that you're going to shut up for 10 seconds. You signal to people, I want to hear what you have to say. I really want to hear what you have to say.
Guest's Book and Personal Growth
00:57:34
Speaker
I'm just not looking for a grab-ass quote.
00:57:37
Speaker
I want to know, I want to know what's in your head. I want to know what's in your heart. And I'm here to listen to you. And whether I've got five minutes or not or 15 minutes or two hours, I can count to 10 to wait.
00:57:50
Speaker
Oh, fantastic. Well, this is great. Like I said, Chip, the book, I think, is an incredible tool that any reporter and editor can just tuck in their back pocket or write in a very easily accessible drawer and be able to page through and go to the gym, so to speak, for their journalistic craft. So I think it's a great gift to the journalism world. So I commend you for doing it. And I ate the book up, and I think it's just a great act of
00:58:18
Speaker
service for the craft of journalism. So thanks so much for the work. You're very generous, Brendan. You always are, to every right of your interview. And I appreciate that very much. Thank you.
00:58:36
Speaker
that was great a lot of fun thanks to ship
00:58:52
Speaker
It's kind of like the Ira Glass thing of the creative gap between your taste and what you're capable of making. I was reading an article about Metallica, surprise, surprise, and their old producer, Fleming Rasmussen, was talking about how in the early days, sort of like Post-Killamal, right around there, so right after their first album,
00:59:11
Speaker
Metallica's ambition far exceeded their skills as musicians. You can see the progression through their career and then soon enough after about 10 years or so their skill really aligned with their ambition.
00:59:27
Speaker
And many of us have outsized ambition that doesn't quite measure up to our skill. Speaking from personal experience, my god, my ambition in my mid to late 20s was stupid. And my skills were pathetic.
00:59:42
Speaker
My skills are still subpar, if I'm being honest. But over the past 10 years or so, my ambitions have severely dulled. I don't even bother getting out the whetstone and sharpening those knives anymore. I'm just like, what's the point?
00:59:59
Speaker
I no longer see any of the goals I once had as attainable. I might as well have been like, I feel like being quarterback of the New England Patriots. It's just dumb. I'm going to dunk on a 10-foot rim. You can't. Anyway, I got a bad head. My dad always said the world needs ditch diggers, and he seemed to think that wouldn't include people like me, which was why he was so disappointed in me when I worked as a janitor in college and was
01:00:26
Speaker
Disappointed I chose to become a journalist writer whatever the hell I am But you know I also thought somewhat differently when he said the world needs ditch diggers because I thought I'm no better than any ditch digger I've actually dug ditches it sucks, but I'm no better than those people Who have to dig dishes ditches? I've had choices others don't have born of unthinkable privilege. I reek of privilege I
01:00:53
Speaker
all the more frustrating that I haven't made anything of myself. But that's, that's just, that's my problem. That is a me problem. In order for people to win, there's gotta be losers, so I don't have much ambition anymore. Better off the people with more skills in ambition, crave in ambition, let them have the spoils.
01:01:19
Speaker
But my skills haven't got, from back then, from the 20s and even the early 30s and probably even the mid to late 30s, my skills have gotten far, far better. So at least the ambition, the wilting ambition is a little more coupled to the skill component. I remember thinking how badly I wanted to be like Wright Thompson or Howard Bryan or Susan Orlean, all these people who would get in the best American sports right now. I was just like, ah, I want that.
01:01:49
Speaker
Like, wouldn't that be great? But I also wanted to be Cal Ripken and Nomar Garcia Parra, and that brought me nothing but pain and frustration, bitterness and self-loathing. Yeah, I'll never be as good as Thompson or Brian Orlean or Tad Friend or Bryn Jonathan Butler or Leah Satilli, and on and on and on. The list is awful long.
01:02:13
Speaker
Listen, I know I can only be myself. There's no sense in comparing. But it was my craven ambition as a baseball player that made me hate baseball. Just because I'm not a pro-caliber writer doesn't mean I'm gonna stop trying. But it does mean I have to drastically lower my expectations, extinguish my ambitions, and just ride the river of discontent for the next 40 years.
Podcast Conclusion
01:02:37
Speaker
Oh my God, he must be sick of me.
01:02:40
Speaker
Shit. I'll stop, I swear. I'll be better. Maybe next week. So stay wild, seeing efforts. And if you can do interviews, see ya!
01:03:30
Speaker
you