The book arrived in the afternoon mail: “Jimmy Breslin: Essential Writings.” I opened to the first story, figuring I’d take a quick look. It was a longish piece written in 1960 about some jockey I’d never heard of. Despite the recent news about Kentucky Derby thoroughbreds dying, I have neither interest in nor knowledge of horse racing. I thought I’d read a few grafs of the story, then set it aside while I tended to other tasks. Instead I stood at the kitchen counter and read the whole thing, more than 5,000 words on a subject I cared nothing about. Until this guy Breslin made me care.

I knew who Breslin was. You’ve probably heard of him, too. He was a legendary New York journalist, a prolific writer of newspaper columns for the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Journal-American, the New York Daily News, and Newsday. In his day — and he had a long “day,” reporting pretty much nonstop from 1960-2012 — he was known for his unique storytelling, his thinking-outside-the-box approach to reporting, his attention to working class people and his colorful personality.

But maybe, like me, you didn’t read Breslin in real time, and you haven’t read him anthologized in a long time. Or maybe ever. Let’s correct this now! His work is masterful, and we can learn from it.

A good place to start is the new anthology, edited by Dan Barry of The New York Times, who knew Breslin and was inspired by his signature approach to journalism.

But before the tutorial, consider first the breathtaking breadth of Breslin’s work: He wrote about horse racing, boxing and baseball. He wrote about Vietnam, Watergate and the American Civil Rights Movement. He wrote about the assassinations of Malcolm X, JFK, and John Lennon. He wrote about Lyndon Johnson in an operating room undergoing gallbladder surgery and Bobby Kennedy in a taxi talking about ice cream and how his dog peed on a famous senator’s rug. He wrote about Big Mama Nunziata, the 77-year-old matriarch of the infamous Gallo crime family. He wrote about gravediggers and cops and longshoremen and waitresses, about teachers and bartenders and taxi drivers. And he wrote, for the most part, under deadline. Let that sink in for a moment.

Here are a few first lines from a sampling of his hundreds of columns:

Patricia Anne Doss, ten, stood in the red dirt and twitched her black toes to brush away the ants crawling over her feet.

All day the helicopters came down out of the terrible sun to pick up the wounded who were wrapped in bandages with blood coming through and the dead whose bodies were in chunks inside ponchos.

It was as graceless at the end as it was at the start.

The hand that rocked the bureaucracy into motion was found, of a Sunday night in June 1974, wrapped around a glass.

How could a reader not read on?

Craft behind the art

More important question: How does Breslin do it?

Let me start with the 30,000-foot answers: He loved what he did, and that showed in every piece he wrote. He respected the people he wrote about, and they felt that, so they trusted him. He had enormous, prodigious, unflagging energy. He was interested in everything. He was the summa cum laude of extroverts.

Okay, but what about craft?

The guy could write a scene. He could write a scene because, in the moment, out there reporting, on deadline, he was in the moment. He noticed everything. He looked everywhere. He listened. He talked to whomever was around. He was out there — not behind a desk, not talking on the phone — but immersed in the worlds he was reporting on. That’s known, endearingly I think, as shoe-leather work. He knew when to describe, when to explain, when to let his subjects tell the story.

Here he is writing about the printing of the final edition of the New York Mirror in “The Wake for a Newspaper” in 1963. Selig Adler was the paper’s managing editor.

Adler walked down one flight of stairs from his office to the Mirror composing room and handed the copy to Marty Tanzer, who was in charge of distributing it to the typesetters.

“What’s this?” Tanzer asked.

“Set this in type and then go get yourself a job,” Adler said. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and walked out of the composing room.

 Here he is with an opening scene of the kind of Thanksgiving Day column no one else would think of writing:

There are no ashtrays on the tables of the Automat. People who smoke sit too long at a table, and the Automat is a place for volume. So yesterday, in the Automat at 33^rd St. and Eighth Ave., the men used their empty coffee cups for putting out cigarettes during the long, deadening afternoon.

 And this — prepare yourself for the most powerful, graceful run-on sentence this side of William Faulkner — is Breslin reporting from Saigon in 1965:

The rain came down on the dullness and squalor of Saigon and drove the people from the streets, the old men who use them for bathrooms, the naked children who crouch in the dirt in front of the shack house, the women who are creased and wispy, the government clerks who ride bicycles and have only small lives in front of them, the American soldiers in short-sleeved shirts who come in washed and red-faced and try to make it a service town but are defeated by its dullness, the policemen who wear white uniforms with sooty collars, and the small round-shouldered men who are of military age but have been let out of the army after three years because the country has been at war for so long that there is no more urgency to it.

 Breslin was also a master of voice and tone. He was often smart, quick, and conversational — the guy on the barstool next to you telling a story. When Viking published an anthology of his columns in 1967, “The World of Jimmy Breslin,”  the review in the Los Angeles Times characterized Breslin’s style as “ a pound of Hemingway and a pound of Joyce and 240 pounds of Breslin.”

He could also be witty, as in this one-line send-up of the 1962 Mets:

The Mets are bad for many reasons, one of which is that they do not have good players.

And a smart-ass, as in this opening scene from a 1969 piece about Joe Namath:

The barmaid had long black hair and she was sitting on top of the bar with her chest coming out of her dress and her skirt useless against the amount of legs she was showing.” 

(One can almost forgive the sexism because the description is so good.)

He knew when to underplay, to report with clinical precision, leaving the emotion to the reader, as in this from his on-the-scene reporting of Malcolm X’s murder:

Malcolm X went straight back and the sound of his head slamming the wooden floor was mixed with screams as he lay on his back on the stage of an old ballroom on 166^th Street and Broadway and he died while two others in the crowd fired their guns, a big-slugged .45 and a .38.

DIY Breslin

After experiencing intense admiration, a soupçon of jealousy, and a dose of nostalgia for the journalism of yore, what can we learn from the work of Jimmy Breslin? Here, I believe, are the simple but powerful take-home messages:

It is possible to do this work. It is possible to write with clarity and grace, with a distinct voice, with narrative structure — on deadline. He did it.

Nothing substitutes for shoe-leather reporting. Today we live and work (and love) in virtual bubbles. But if we want to bring readers to a place, we have to be there ourselves. And not just to dash out to report a particular story. To walk the streets, to talk to passersby, to go to events, to learn about, observe and wrap ourselves in the communities we write about.

Maybe the story is outside the frame. Let other reporters look straight ahead. We can follow Breslin’s lead and look to the sides, or behind. Think of Breslin going to an Automat on Thanksgiving to observe the old men who eat there. Think of Breslin writing about the shooting of John Lennon not as a crime story, and not with John Lennon at the center, but from a cop’s eye view. Think of Breslin writing about the man tasked with digging JFK’s grave. It’s as simple — and as challenging — as turning your head, as looking elsewhere, as hearing and listening to other voices.

Tone and voice are not the sole property of fiction writers. Breslin got the facts, stuck to the facts, and then wrote the hell out of the story. He spoke to readers from the page, his voice reflecting both the subject matter and his own personality. He did this without becoming part of the story or overwhelming the story. He did this not just by knowing who he was, but by spending the time to know whom he was writing about.

Reading him does not have to be an exercise in nostalgia. It can be a lesson in what great journalism can be.

Breslin basics

Jimmy Breslin was born to a working-class Irish-American family in 1928, in Queens, New York. He began his long career as a copy boy at the Long Island Press (a college drop-out who “majored in excuses”) later working for a string of New York newspapers. His work earned him two Pulitzers, a Metropolitan Reporting Award, a Damon Runyon Award (for distinctive writing style) and many other accolades. He wrote his final column in 2012. He died in 2017.

* * *

Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 nonfiction books.

The post Essential Breslin: Artful narrative by a master of journalistic craft appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

We’re sitting on folding chairs around a scarred table, the linoleum veneer curling at the edges, in an airless, windowless room. It’s me and nine men, ranging in age from 38 to 81, all of whom, decades ago, did something that landed them here, in a maximum security prison, for sentences ranging from 25 years to forever. Their heads are bent over sheets of looseleaf paper, their hands are gripping pencils.

They are writing.

That’s what happens in this room for two-and-a-half hours every other week. They write. Then they read aloud from their work and listen as others read. They comment: dark humor, in-jokes, shared experiences, editorial insights. Meanwhile, I jump (lightly) on the teaching moments as they occur, and these men begin to learn the art and craft of narrative nonfiction, of storytelling journalism.

Those of us who do this for a living, do this work — and it is work — because we love it, because it feeds our curiosity, because it helps us understand people and community and our world (and we hope it does that for others), because we believe journalism is a cornerstone of democracy. Because we get paid. And because we tell ourselves we not really good at anything else.

But what about these men,? Why do they swelter and hunch over paper in this room? Why do they show up to write, to learn, to edit, to revise?

And what might we, the professionals, learn from them?

Finding your voice and story

These men are locked cages. They live their lives behind a 30-foot-high concrete perimeter wall. With the exception of one, they did not come to the group I started at Oregon State Penitentiary thinking of themselves as writers. Although we met — as writers —for two-hour sessions twice a month until the pandemic shut us down, their identity was consumed by their circumstance: They were inmates. They were prisoners or, as the Department of Corrections decided to rename them in what the men consider a laughable euphemism, AICs, or “adults in custody.” Most held a romanticized or idealized vision of what it means to be a writer, a sense that writing flows naturally from those blessed with talent. Most were unschooled. Most had never been exposed to great writing. (More on this later.)

Shut away from the world, they became invisible. They were voiceless. And they knew just how invisible and voiceless they were.

Journalists are often stymied in our attempts to make the world of incarceration knowable to our readers — prisons keep people in and media out. But we do have a platform from which to speak, both professionally and personally. Working with these men over the course of three years, I was reminded again and again of my privilege of voice, my professional platform (yes, of course, some of it not just privilege but also the result of decades of hard work). These reminders reenergized my sense of responsibility to use my time and experience as a reporter in ways that might make a difference. This is why I went on to write two books about the challenges of life in prison and the challenges upon reentry into life taken for granted by the rest of us.

But these men were hunched and scribbling in this room because they wanted and needed to tell their own stories.

When they showed up for the writers’ group, they weren’t thinking in these terms. They weren’t thinking “I have a story to tell,” because they did not think of themselves as writers, and they did not think of their experiences as the plot of a nonfiction story they could craft. It was my job to help them see that. In framing their experiences this way, in slowly learning how to commit snippets of their lives to words on paper, they were, without realizing it at first, taking control. If they could write the narrative, they might be able to change the narrative, to imagine a different life, to write a new chapter, to move forward.

In learning to write about their experiences, both before and during incarceration, the imprisoned men learned what we trained-as-hard-news journalists are continuing to learn and practice: Story is the way to reach people, and details bring issues to life. At first their writing was dry — recitations, a summaries, paragraphs of explanation. But when they read aloud, others in the group chimed in with actual stories. The conversations turned lively. And the door opened wide for me to talk about the emotional connection a story can forge with readers, how scenes and action and dialog can bring a reader into a moment.

Internal and external obstacles

But they faced obstacles we professionals do not. The first was education. Data from the National Former Prison Survey reveals that more than half of incarcerated people hold only a high school diploma or GED, and a quarter hold no educational credential at all. To what extent high school classes actually teach a student to write is debatable, but at least writing is required, from long-form answers on tests to essays and term reports. That was not part of most of imprisoned men’s experience, so their knowledge of and confidence about the fundamentals — language use, vocabulary, grammar — was at a low ebb. It was an act of bravery, or maybe hubris, for them to put words on paper. But over time, I believe this helped them foster a belief in themselves.

A related obstacle was their exposure, or lack thereof, to good writing. Prison libraries are underfunded, understocked and understaffed. The material on the shelves skews to self-help (addiction, anger management, etc.), religion-based inspirational work and what I think of as “recreational fiction.”

So when we started to talk about crafting scenes to make a story come alive, most of the men had never read a piece of narrative nonfiction or storytelling journalism. But learning by example is so important. Outside prison walls, we get to do that every day as we read great journalism, listen to storytelling podcasts, immerse ourselves in books based on meticulous reporting. To be a writer, you must be a reader.

So one of my tasks became bringing books and articles into prison. This was not easy. Reading material is strictly controlled; inmates can be cited for an infraction (and lose privileges or worse, spend time in solitary) for having an unapproved book or magazine in their cell. You may have also read about the growing wave of book banning in prisons. I was not bringing in anything incendiary, but bringing in anything at all (a pencil, a candy bar) is problematic, sometimes seriously so. Had it not been for the extraordinary support of one prison staffer — a man who, despite working in the belly of the beast, believed in education, rehabilitation and second chances — I could not have done this.

During the three-plus years the group met, I was able to bring in, item by item, almost 100 narrative nonfiction books and articles. The men had eclectic tastes, ranging from the gritty Vietnam memoir “Zero Dark Thirty” to Susan Orlean’s quirky biography of “Rin Tin Tin.” They loved Tony Horowitz’s “Blue Latitudes,” and were fascinating by Mary Roach’s “Gulp.” “Geez,” one of the men told me after reading Roach’s exploration of the alimentary canal in two days. “I guess a good writer can make anything interesting.” The prison’s furniture hobby shop provided us with a locked cabinet for the “writers’ library.” One of the men took on the role of the librarian, signing out material and tracking returns.

The men, when given opportunity, access and choice, turned out to be eager, hungry, voracious readers. Starving, in fact. The way we all should be. The way I wish I still was. I read so much now for research and reporting that my other reading — primarily the work of journalists and nonfiction authors I greatly admire — is relegated to the final 20 minutes before slumber. I want to take a lesson from the men and become hungry again. Maybe you are ready for that as well?

Writing lessons from non-writers

Here is another lesson these prisoners have for those of us who write as our profession: Because they did not think of themselves as writers, they did not suffer the ego problems that hound us. Their humility and openness to constructive criticism — not to mention tough editing — was beyond admirable. I have worked with some fine editors (top on the list is the editor of Nieman Storyboard), but I also have resisted and fought editing — some of it probably pretty decent — because I was too in love with my own words.

These men were sponges for the editing process. They delighted when they received their work back covered in ink. They asked for more. Some of the work ended up being published; some won awards. These pieces, and hundreds of others that never saw the light of day outside those walls, went through multiple revisions. I believe the record was seven.

Of course, these men had time — a dark-humor joke they frequently made when faced with another revision — that working journalists often do not. But it was their eagerness, their openness to actual revision (literally “seeing again”) that was so refreshing.

A final lesson from these caged writers, especially for those of us who freelance — which means we labor over detailed pitches that don’t get green-lit, or who write books, which means we labor over 10,000-word proposals that go nowhere: It is not publication that makes a writer. It is writing. It is the act of seeing and hearing, of recording and remembering, of shaping.

As I told the men so many times and as I struggle to remind myself. Maybe you can use a reminder, too, this one from Marge Piercy:

The real writer is one

who really writes…

Work is its own cure.

* * *

Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 nonfiction books.

The post What a prison writing program taught a professional writer from the inside out appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

“We’ve got a paper to get out.”

That's the matter-of-fact directive from Zoe Toperosky to a roomful of reporters and editors. She is talking through a mask in that just-loud-enough, crisply enunciated way that veteran mask-wearers have perfected during the past three years.

She looks across the newsroom, past more than a dozen of her colleagues. Most are busy working on their laptops with that manic look of reporters on deadline. Others, heads bent, are marking up an initial proof of the paper. Behind them hangs a whiteboard with 20 stories listed under “Brainstorm” for this current issue. Among them:

• A Catholic Response to Gender Identity Theory
• Survivor Support
• Oregon Houseless Problems
• Teachers’ Collective Bargaining

Here's the surprise: Zoe is a 17-year-old high school junior, one of four editors of her school’s newspaper, The Headlight. The newsroom is a classroom at Ida B. Wells High School in Portland, Oregon.

I am here at the school, fly-on-the-wall, watching — and marveling at — these fledgling journalists. I am marveling at their seriousness of purpose and the scope, and depth of the issues they are choosing to write about. My high school newspaper, The Spotlight in Levittown, New York, shone its light on such weighty concerns as the assignment of hall lockers, the upcoming Senior Carnival and the newly formed boys’ lacrosse team. I have a vague memory of contributing a scathing editorial on the unfairness of the school’s “no sandals” dress code policy.

I am marveling also that Ida B. Wells even has a newspaper — and journalism classes to boot. For most of the last century students at virtually every high school in the country published a newspaper. It was often a source of school pride, not perhaps as exciting as a winning sports team but part of the vibrant life of the school. As The National Federal of State High School Associations put it:

Being the school’s newspaper editor…was a coveted position — one that carried with it quite a bit of responsibility and the matching amount of respect among one’s peers. Being a member of the newspaper staff came with prestige…

(To be clear: This was the nerd version of prestige. The real prestige at my school was enjoyed by the head cheerleader and the captain of the football team.)

But for years now, journalists, scholars and teachers have been lamenting the decline of student newspapers. A 2022 report from the director of the high school journalism program at Baruch College, City University of New York, estimated that almost three-quarters of the city’s high schools did not have a student newspaper, print or online. A 2013 report in The New York Times stated that only 1 in 8 of New York’s public high schools had a student newspaper; a brief responding commentary by NPR’s Scott Simon referred to the student press as “an endangered species.”

A legacy carried forward

The why is not complicated: shrinking teaching staffs, tight budgets, focus on core academics (the same reason many schools ditched art and music classes) and a laser focus on teaching to prepare students for standardized tests. Also, of course, social media and texting make it easy for students to keep up with what’s going on in their schools, lessening the need for a formalized here’s-what’s-happening publication. And it may not be lost on today’s high schoolers that, in the world outside their campuses, newspapers in general are not the most popular pursuit.

But at Ida B. Wells, The Headlight is shining brighter and brighter, thanks in great part to the legacy of a beloved journalism adviser, Andrea Patton, who died last summer. To listen to the editors talk about her is to understand the power a single teacher can have on the life of a student. (When Mr. Hawkey, my hard-ass 11^th-grade English teacher, said to me as I left his classroom that last day of school, “You are a writer,” I was transformed.)

It also is to understand what journalism can mean to this next generation.

“She was constantly pushing us to have difficult conversations and think deeply about the words we were writing,” wrote one of the editors, Cate Latimer, in a special tribute issue to Patton produced this spring. “She challenged my understanding of journalism…I was hooked.” Another of the editors, Sierra Donis, wrote that she learned that “we write …to ‘shine the light of truth’ on things that we hold love or concern for.” Editor Meira Fiber-Munro stated simply and powerfully: “She changed my life.”

It was not lost on Patton, nor is it lost on these student journalists, that their school is named  after the crusading investigative journalist, educator and early leader of the civil rights movement who dedicated her career to combating prejudice and violence. What had been Woodrow Wilson High School since the mid-1950s was renamed for Ida B. Wells in early 2021 in response to community pressure after the murder of George Floyd. There is a strong sense among these students, fueled by the energy generated by Patton, that their renamed school should be home to a strong, vibrant, socially conscious newspaper.

Mature stories, ethics and relationships

On this day, Zoe Toperosky continues her pep talk to colleagues in the classroom-turned-newsroom. All the copy has to be in by Friday, which is two days away, she tells the staff. There are groans. Then, one girl says, “Hey, people are actually talking about the paper.”

“Really?” says Zoe, delighted. “That is so cool.”

“Yeah,” says a guy in the back, “I heard that one story was actually used as an assignment in a class.”

I see Andrea Patton’s legacy play out in front of me not only in the sophistication of the stories these kids are tackling but also in the maturity and sensitivity of the editors. I listen as Zoe and Meira talk to one of the reporters. They had come to her desk rather than call her over to theirs; the conversation that follows unfolds as an anti-power play that removes some of the stress from a stressful encounter. The hard truth is that the editors have decided not to run the story, a lengthy piece the reporter cares deeply about. The story in question focuses on the mental health of a particular teacher who took a self-care and therapeutic leave.

“I know that he freely gave you this story,” Zoe says, keeping her voice low, leaning in. “But it feels like an invasion of privacy.”

The story exposes personal details about the teacher, she explains. The writer is clearly crestfallen. She tells Zoe and Meira, who is quiet but present to give Zoe back-up if needed, about how good the interview was, how important the story is. “Yes,” says Zoe. “Exactly. This is a super important issue — teachers’ mental health. The story needs to broaden out to that.”

I don’t know what impresses me more: the editorial savvy behind the awareness of the bigger issue (these are 17-year-olds, remember) or the ethical sensitivity to invasion of privacy or the way Zoe handles the whole encounter. She and Meira exchange glances. It is clear the team of editors has agonized over this.

“You worked hard,” Zoe says, needing to move on to the next story meeting. “I know this is frustrating.” The reporter is staring down at her laptop, her eyes scanning the story that will not be published in this final issue of the school year. “You should be proud of it,” Zoe assures. “Let’s make this a big story next year.”

Principles with purpose

Plans are already forming for next year. Among them, plans to go out into the community to sell advertising to support more print issues of the paper. This year, in part due to lack of budget and the transition from Patton to a new adviser — English teacher Haven Kaplan-Miner, who the kids call “KM” — the paper existed mostly online. The exception was the “Patton Pages” tribute issue and this final issue being readied for print in early June. The school does not fund the newspaper, although it does support two journalism elective classes, one introductory and one focused on the creation of the paper.

The 90-minute editorial session continues. Meira stops by the desk of a reporter who has researched and written a story about a lithium mine on the Oregon-Nevada border. They go over they edits, line by line. Then she confers with a reporter who has written a story about the future of electric cars. (He admits later, when I ask, that if he could buy any car, it would be a Corvette.) Now Zoe is in the front of the room leading a brainstorming session to generate ideas for the final page of the issue, which will be a recap of the year’s progress and a shout-out to the seniors.

Meanwhile, I talk with another reporter who has written a piece about porn star Stormy Daniels and former President Donald J. Trump. I ask him about his own politics and how it might have affected the story. His response would warm the heart of all hard-working journalists everywhere:

“I put my biases aside to gather the information. I want people to know the facts so they can make informed decisions. That’s my job.”

Others who had been schooled in Andrea Patton's vision of journalism told me similar things:

"I am passionate about journalism because it brings voice to paper, it gives communities a voice and gives people a reason to listen. I am proud to be able to report on the state of my community and the issues most prominent, hoping that it does make a difference. I look forward to continuing this endeavor for many years to come." ~ Zoe Toperosky, co-editor

"I love working in journalism because it's a creative career path with so much versatility in the same environment that offers the opportunity to build long lasting relationships and explore the world. I also really enjoy the collaborative aspect of working in a newsroom that motivates finding and helping to tell truths. My late advisor Ms. Patton always emphasized that journalists have a critical role in upholding democracy and taught that there is space to advocate for social justice within journalism while reporting without bias." ~ Meira Fiber-Munro, co-editor

"Journalism is everything I’ve ever wanted in a career: listening, talking, writing, storytelling…all my passions in one place." ~ Julia Boboc, former editor now studying journalism at the University of Oregon

That’s what they are learning. That’s what they are practicing. That’s why journalism is — and needs to be — a vital part of high school education. These student journalists are our future.

* * *

Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 nonfiction books.

The post The future of journalism in very good hands appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the final post in our focused series on the core elements of narrative by nonfiction writer and teacher Lauren Kessler. Previous posts provided an overview of the power of narrative, how to build a story through scenes and how to report and write memorable characters.

When a friend returned the book I loaned her a few weeks ago, she said what I knew she would say: “I loved it right up until that ending.” She shook her head. “That ending.” We talked for a minute about the wonderfully quirky conceit of the book— “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus — the vibrant central character, the genius dog, the precocious child. But the ending? The ending, we agreed, was contrived. It took all the oomph out of the narrative, at least for us. “Why did the author think she had to wrap it up with a bow?” my friend asked.

Why did the author think she had to wrap it up with a bow? Why do we who write nonfiction, who work as (or are learning to become) narrative journalists, often feel compelled to create a tidy package to deliver to the reader? Why is it such a struggle to write ourselves to a satisfying ending?

Here’s a thought, courtesy of one of the finest writers of narrative nonfiction: “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”  That’s Joan Didion beginning one of her most memorable essays, “Goodbye to All That.”

Didion is writing about the beginning and end of a love affair — hers, with the city of New York — but I think it is an equally wise statement about writing. It is easier to know when and where to start than when and where to finish.  And because of that, it is easier to write good beginnings than it is to craft good endings.

I don’t think it’s particularly mysterious that we struggle with endings. The final pages or paragraphs or even sentences of a story carry extraordinary weight. They can and should leave a lasting impression on the reader and often determine the overall success of the narrative. That is a lot of pressure. This could be why some endings seem forced or contrived. We must make our point! We must tie up loose ends! This is our last chance.

The challenge of endings may also be a matter of focus. Throughout the thinking, reporting and organizing phases of a piece of writing — everything we do before sitting down to actually write — we often concentrate on how and where our story will begin. We narrative journalists are suckers for a great opener. The lead — or lede, as some prefer — is the most important part of the story. We obsess over what that first sentence will be, that opening scene, that initial snippet of dialog, that quotable quote. That’s good.

But all that focus on beginnings means less, or in my cases no, concentration on endings.

Obstacles to a good ending

Some writers cling to the myth that once they figure out how to begin a story, the rest will just “fall into place.” Sometimes the magic happens. Often, not so much. Endings generally don’t miraculously materialize. And the danger of thinking (or hoping) they will means not devoting enough thought to them at the beginning.

The mechanics of the writing process can also stand in the way of creating a memorable ending. If we’re not batting out something on deadline and have a few days, or even a few weeks, to craft a piece, consider how that works. We invariable come back to the story by re-reading it. We read, re-read and then, of course, edit, and polish the beginning. Again and again. By the end of the process, we may have burnished and refined the opening paragraphs five, six perhaps a dozen times. But the ending — the last scene, the last paragraph, the last sentence we write — is the least edited. Of course it isn’t as strong.

And let’s not forget the hallowed “inverted pyramid.” Many narrative journalists, myself included, learned to write in journalism school, where we were taught that the way to organize a story was from most important element to least.  Using this model, we pyramid-veterans might end the story when we run out of material important enough to include or, frankly, when we run out of allowed room or time.  In other words, there is no ending — no considered, crafted way to bring a story to a close.

Thinking of stories as a whole

What to do? Maybe these suggestions will help:

The first is conceiving of the story as a story, by which I mean a narrative, a tale, rather than a coherently ordered collection of information. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends, all of which are important and purposeful and carefully molded.  Once we frame an assignment as a story rather than a report, we immediately become attuned to endings. The news feature that was going to be a serviceable piece about a facility that helps feed the food-insecure becomes a vignette- and scene-powered story. When I approached “Shelter from the Storm” this way, letting the vignettes tell the story, the ending vignette was obvious.

Second suggestion is this: Although it is a mistake to believe that once we figure out how to begin a story, the rest (including the ending) will spontaneously generate, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the material we have gathered will lead to an ending as we write. The key is that we have conceived of the piece as a story and conducted our reporting to gather that kind of material. This is not “go with the flow” advice. It is, in fact, pro-active. It is being alert and attentive to the narrative structure, reporting with narrative needs in mind, then watching it from the outside even as we are writing it from the inside.

Occasionally a story will naturally and neatly conclude: the “and they all lived happily (or unhappily) ever after” variety. I don’t mean to imply that these kinds of endings are always trite but that they are definitive and conclusive — and, in real life, rare. Other stories naturally end in a mystery, a question unanswered, a conflict unresolved or unresolvable. Some narratives fold in on themselves or come full circle. When I wrote a piece about my love-hate relationship with the potato, the story began in the potato fields of Long Island with my mother cursing the volunteer spuds in our backyard garden and ended with me, 50 years later, embracing the diversity of the lowly spud and choosing to plant it in my garden. My most recent book, “Free,” which examines the challenges of reentry after long-time incarceration, opens when one man is released from prison, leaving behind a fellow prisoner, a close friend and mentor. It ends when the other man, three years later, finally gains his freedom. The two releases act as narrative bookends.

Here’s the third idea that may help illuminate the path to a good ending: Focus on the readers. We offer stories in the hopes that our readers will learn and care and question, empathize, sympathize, laugh, get angry. We write for them. And so, when contemplating how to end a story or when scrutinizing the ending we’ve written, it makes sense to ask:

• Does this ending deliver what I promised the reader at the beginning?
• Does this ending leave the reader with a sense of time well spent?
• Does this ending leave the reader smarter?
• Does this ending leave the reader with something to think about?

The contrived ending often does not. The tidy-little-package ending often does not. The non-ending ending (ran out of good material) often does not.

Ambiguity in endings ~ as in life

There are alternatives. Consider the power of a scene as an ending device. This can be a scene that captures the essence of the story or brings the narrative full circle — like the end scene in “Free” — or that presents a sort of cliff-hanger, leaving the reader to wonder and want to read more.

There is a difference between leaving the reader wanting more (curious, engaged) and leaving the reader unsatisfied (confused, cheated). When I was struggling with how to end my exploration of middle school, teen girl culture, and parenting a 21^st century teen in “My Teenage Werewolf,” I knew the natural conclusion to the story was the end of middle school. But there was no tidy ending to the issues raised by the narrative. And so, in the final scene, at the eighth-grade graduation dance, the reader is left not with a “well, that’s over” feeling but rather wondering “what happens next?”

Ending with a conversation among the characters in the story or with one character’s monolog can also create a meaningful ending.

I also think there is a place for what I’ll call the “transparent” ending. This is when the writer admits, in exposition, that this story doesn’t have an ending. The crisis continues. The relationship remains unstable. The goal has not been reached. The jury is still out. It is a candid admission to the reader, whom you have taken along for the ride, that there’s no grand finale here. This can be the only credible and honest way to end.

Reader validation

Endings are a challenge, no doubt about it.  But a strong, satisfying, meaningful conclusion is worth the thought, planning the effort extra it takes.

I like to imagine my ideal reader.  She is sitting in her favorite chair thoroughly absorbed in my article. She comes to the final few paragraphs. They bring the story into focus for her. They leave her with ideas worth pondering, with an image she’ll remember.  She nods to herself, then sits for a long moment before she reaches for her phone. “Let me tell you about this piece I just finished reading,” she says to her friend.

* * *

Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 nonfiction books.

The post Endings: How to leave readers satisfied ~ and wanting more appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third post in our focused series on the core elements of narrative by nonfiction writer and teacher Lauren Kessler. Previous posts provided an overview of the power of narrative and how to build a story through scenes. A final post in the series will explore effective endings.

Scarlet O’Hara, Katniss Everdeen, Harry Potter, Vito Corleone, Jo March, James Bond. What do these fictional folks have in common?

They are unforgettable characters. They are embedded in our psyches and imaginations. We feel we know them. And, although we may have little in common with them, we feel a connection.

What if the readers of our stories felt the same way about the people in our journalistic stories—maybe not forever but at least in the moment?

They can. And maybe they should.

Among the things I had to unlearn from my traditional journalism training as I labored to become a nonfiction storyteller was this: The place of people in a story, and the journalists’ attitude toward people in their stories. I had been taught in j-school classes to think of people as either objects in a story or sources of information for that story. If they were objects, things happened to them (they were robbed) or they did things (they opened a business). If they were sources of information, they were mined for usable material.  Either way, what you did with people was this: You asked them questions. They answered. You scribbled. If you were lucky, you got a good quote. And, maybe, in between scribbling, you looked around for descriptive details to insert in the story. “Cluttered desk,” you wrote down diligently.  “Coffee stain on shirt.”

But really, it didn’t matter if you saw a person — live or on Zoom — or heard a person, or if you spent 10 minutes or two hours with a person, because people only existed to provide information or to answer your specific questions so you could write things about them. My ah-ha! moment about this came after I wrote a story based on a long interview believing I understood the person at the core of the story. I didn’t. That was because during the time I spent with her, I saw her not as a character at the center of the story, not as a person to be understood, but rather as a source from whom information could be extracted. She was a cardboard cut-out — an interesting cardboard cut-out, but an object without life.

Beyond the bio to character

In a recent piece for my Storyboard series on essential narrative elements, I proclaimed that scenes were the heart of narrative journalism. I take that back. Characters are the heart. Characters inhabit those scenes and make them work. Characters propel the story forward. They connect us to issues, bring resonance to facts, make us care. People care about people, plain and simple.

So how do you make a character come alive on the page? Consider those unforgettable fictional characters I mentioned above. What made them come alive for you? You know what they look like, sound like, move like — not just the ones you’ve seen on screen but the ones you have imagined in your head when you read words on the page. You feel you know them: what they want, what they care about, obstacles they face and how they face them, and enough of their backstory to make some sense of who they are.

That sounds like a lot. It sounds complicated. But really, it isn’t. What underlies the art of bringing a character to life on the page is the reporting, which comes down to this: Listen. Watch. Let them be who they are.

Listening does not mean half-listening to a response to one of your questions while the other half of you concentrates on what your next question you be. It means focused attention. It means being sincerely interested — and mostly silent. Watching is not passive. It is an intense activity that takes enormous concentration. It is the learned and practiced ability to see both big picture and small detail in the moment. By “let them be who they are,” I mean stepping back, not directing the conversation or the action but allowing the character to show you what’s important to them, in words or deed.

Reporting tools to reveal character

Consider these six ways we have to bring a character to life:

• What the character looks like
• What surrounds the character
• What the character says
• What the character does
• What the character thinks
• The character’s backstory

What the character looks like might include physical features, clothing, posture, demeanor, or mannerisms. When Nora Ephron — an extraordinary journalist before she became a screenwriter — profiled men’s clothing designer Bill Blass for the New York Times, she began with a deadpan head-to-toe description of his outfit. (The prices are 1968, so don’t be shocked!):

One day not long ago, Bill Blass, who is tall, slender and tawny and speaks with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, was standing in his brown plaid Bill Blass suit ($175), his brown Bill Blass shirt ($22.50), his brown Bill Blass silk tie ($15) and brown Bill Blass buckled shoes ($50) in the center of the Bill Blass men’s boutique at Bonwit Teller’s.

In Ephron’s deft hands, Blass becomes a walking advertisement, the brand incarnate. You know this guy.

Sometimes it’s the briefest of glimpses that can bring a person to life as a character, that “telling detail,” that says more than it says, that is both descriptive and evocative. Think Scarlet O’Hara’s 18-inch waist. Think Harry Potter’s scar. In a portrait of the pugnacious teamster boss Tony Provenzano, Jimmy Breslin has us readers notice the diamond ring sparkling on the man’s pinkie finger. A diamond. On a pinkie. On a teamster. This speaks volumes. In a profile I wrote of a woman’s college basketball coach, I direct the reader’s attention to the 3-inch heels this 6’3” woman wears as she paces up and down the sidelines. These are small telling details.

Characters also come alive when the reader can see them in context — in their surroundings, their environment. It’s helpful to think like a cinematographer about this, offering readers a pan (a sweeping landscape), a mid-shot (an office, a kitchen), a close-up (a desktop) or an extreme close-up (a coffee cup). The people who surround a character, at work, at home and at play can add context. Animals, too. As Emmanuel Kant is reputed to have said: “You can judge the heart of a man by how he treats animals.”

What characters say (conversation and dialog rather than just quotes) and what characters do (from the boldest of actions to the smallest of twitches) go a long way to bringing them to life. It is matter of being there to listen and notice, to watch as they do what they do, and then to choose the bits bit of dialog, action or inaction that illuminates and reveals. In a story I wrote about a facility that feeds the unhoused and food insecure, I captured the experience and intensity of the chef by focusing on his knife skills.

Ask rather than assume

What a character thinks can also be extraordinarily revealing but difficult to ascertain. As nonfiction writers we cannot suppose or imagine what characters are thinking. We cannot project what we would think in their circumstance and place this inside their heads. But we can ask them, in the moment, what they are thinking. We can, if given access, discover what they were thinking at other moments by looking at texts or social media posts.

Finally, characters’ backstories — the key events that brought them to this place, to world of the story you are writing — can provide insights into who they are. A little goes a long way. A backstory is not a resume, a recitation of achievements or failures. It is, again, the small, carefully chosen detail. When I was researching the life of an American spy for the biography “Clever Girl,” I found out everything I could about her four years at Vassar: every course she took and every grade she got, what activities she participated in. But the piece of that backstory I used was what I learned when visiting her freshman dorm room. It was the last room on the corridor and the only single on the floor. It faced north and was dark most of the day. It faced away from the quad, away from campus. That was her life for a year. It helped me understand her, and I hoped it did the same for my readers.

The biggest take-away from all this is that once you begin to see people as characters in a story rather than sources of information you hold a powerful narrative tool in your hands. People make the story live. They engage the reader. They may even be unforgettable.

* * *

Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 nonfiction books.

The post Character: The beating heart of narrative appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second post in our focused series on the core elements of narrative by narrative journalist and teacher Lauren Kessler. Future posts will explore the development of character and crafting of story endings.

A passage from a true story:

In Portland, in the spare bedroom in his daughter’s house, David Bradley was sitting up in bed dressed in a thick, scarlet-colored robe, his dog Scooter napping by his feet, the bottle of Nembutal on the night table. When the doctor arrived in the early evening, the family was finishing its farewells. They had all sat together in David’s room that last week watching old episodes of the TV miniseries “Lonesome Dove,” his favorite movie in which–it was hard not to notice–the fiercely independent main character chooses to die on his own terms.

David picked up the end of his feeding tube, removed the plug and poured in the liquid Nembutal. Then he poured in a cup of water to make sure the medicine went down, re-stoppered the tube and settled back on his pillows. He talked to the doctor sitting beside him about how much he loved his family.

Downstairs, eight people sat in a circle on the floor, including David’s three daughters and his sister. In the middle of the circle were objects important to David: an eagle feather, the Leatherman tool he always carried with him, a battered stuffed animal he had when he was a child. Each person picked up an object and told a story about it. Then they went around the circle again, this time each person holding David’s eagle feather and saying whatever they wanted to say. David had wanted someone to recite the strong, unsentimental poem John Wayne had said at Howard Hawks’ funeral, “Do not stand at my grave and weep,” and so someone did.

Upstairs, David yawned. The Nembutal was beginning to take effect. David motioned the doctor closer. He had one more thing to say.

“You know,” he said quietly, “I’ve done a lot of things right.”

Then he smiled and closed his eyes and fell asleep. Within a few minutes, he was unconscious. Within 10 minutes he stopped breathing. The doctor felt for his pulse and found none, listened for his heartbeat, and heard none.

You were there.

Only you weren’t. The magic of scene-setting took you there.

But it isn’t magic. It is the result of engaged reporting, careful observation, thoughtful questioning, meticulous note-taking and cognitive empathy — those journalistic skills we practice and hone every day — plus a flair for narrative. Narrative journalism — the literary journalism or long-form reportage by the likes of Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin —is primarily found in a few elite magazines. But the legacy of that work continues in the narrative approach sometimes found in news, feature and investigative journalism. This approach translates into thinking story, seeing events through a storytelling lens, reporting with the goal of gathering material for storytelling and embracing some of the elements crucial to compelling storytelling.

Chief among these is the crafting of scenes.

The scenes that build the story

Scenes are the building blocks of narrative construction, from stories on the big and small screen to novels to, yes, journalism. Scenes immerse readers in the moment, bring characters to life, and set a tone. The reader is in the room with David watching these last moments of his life. The reader is downstairs watching David’s family participate in a final ritual. It is woven into “The End in Two Acts,” a story I wrote for the Los Angeles Times in 2007. It includes interviews with medical and legal experts on “death with dignity,” religious and political arguments for and against end-of-life legislation, historical context, statistics gleaned from documents and testimonies — the stuff of solid, traditional reporting. But it is the scene that pulls in the reader and, most important, compels the reader to read on.

The only difference between writing a scene as a novelist and writing a scene as a journalist — and it is a huge and existentially important difference — is that journalists do not fabricate scenes; they report them.

Here is a very short scene, a snippet, from later in that same article, which contrasts David’s death with the end-of-life decisions faced by another man, Tom, who lived in a state without the Death with Dignity option. Here is Tom testifying in a court case:

“My doctor told me I’d know when I’m near the end because I’ll be coughing up blood,” he said. He was sitting motionless, a little slumped, at the witness table. “I’m not too thrilled with the prospect of ending my life drowning in my own blood.” His voice cracked. Someone brought him a glass of water, and he composed himself.

Reporting that serves the writing

I chose “The End in Two Acts” to illustrate the crafting of scenes for two reasons: First, as the author, I know exactly what went into the process of reporting and writing. Second, the three scenes you just read — David upstairs, his family downstairs and Tom in court — were based on different reporting methods, all of which are viable and legitimate ways to gather material for scenes. Reporting comes before writing, so let me explain.

The downstairs scene of David’s family was based on direct observation, being there, fly-on-the-wall reporting. I sat quietly in the corner and took notes.

The scene upstairs reads like the product of direct observation, but was not. David did not want anyone in the room except the doctor. And, frankly, I would not have asked to be there. So how did I get the material? I debriefed the doctor, a highly trained observer who was required to take second-by-second notes and had the family’s permission to share them with me. I had interviewed him before. We had established a rapport. He read his notes to me. I followed up with specific questions. I had previously seen David’s room and had notes describing it. I had several conversations with his daughter both before and after his death. I had met his dog.

The scene of Tom in court was written after I watched and rewatched the tape of that testimony.

A scene can be written only if the journalist has the material, however that material is ever-so-carefully gathered. A scene can be written well only if the journalist knows what makes a scene work. And guess what? We all do, even if we’ve never tried writing a scene in a piece of journalism. We read novels and short stories, see movies and watch drama and comedy on the small screen. We know scenes.

The raw material of scenes

A scene puts the reader inside the story. It is both descriptive and evocative. It has tone. It has emotional content. We know, from our own reading and viewing, the key element of a scene: There is setting. There are characters. Something happens. Characters reveal themselves in some way. The story — the plot — is advanced in some way. That’s the guts of a scene.

Scenes are most often a mix of description (describing the setting, the character or characters), narration (the telling of what happens) and exposition (explaining what might be necessary to help readers understand). The trick — and of course, it is not a trick — is to choose and use just what is needed to paint a picture and pull readers into the moment. Too little and the picture is fuzzy or incomplete or, worse, confusing. Too much and the reader is overwhelmed, not knowing where to look, what to pay attention to or, worse, bored.

Good choices rely on having more material than you need and then extracting the small details and precise actions that capture the moment and the purpose of that moment in the story. In the scene with David, for example, there is no physical description of the man. Of course, I had this in my notes, but I chose instead to describe what he was wearing — the thick, richly colored bathrobe. To me, this one detail caught the softness, the hominess of his death at home. I chose not to spend words describing what his bedroom looked like. Did that matter? Instead, I wanted reader to see his dog, Scooter, on the bed, the Nembutal on the bedside table. At the end of that first paragraph,  I came in with a bit of exposition about “Lonesome Dove.”

The narration, both of David upstairs and his family downstairs, is presented as simply as possible, unadorned by adjectives, adverbs, metaphors, whatever. The moments themselves were dramatic; I did not want to force more drama into the retelling. I wanted the drama, the emotion to come from what the readers took out — not any extras I put in.

In addition to detail, understatement and appropriate tone, consider two other “tricks” to making a scene work: the position of the “camera” and pacing. Our words control the camera — and thus the reader’s attention. Upstairs, the scene is a close-up: David. Downstairs, the camera is pulled back allowing the reader to see the circle of family in one shot. Upstairs, the pacing is deliberate and slow: The actions David takes when he ingests the medication. Downstairs, the pacing is brisk: We don’t hear what every family member says. We get a quick summary.

Scenes are a wonderfully satisfying challenge to write. More important: They are essential to narrative and a powerfully compelling way to connect with readers.

* * *

Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 nonfiction books.

The post Reporting and writing scenes: The foundational building block of stories appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: In coming weeks, narrative journalist and teacher Lauren Kessler will identify and explore the key elements of nonfiction storytelling, including scene, character and endings.

There was something of a Camelot — a brief and shining moment — for long-form narrative journalism in newspapers. This “American Literary Movement” (thus proclaimed by the Encyclopedia Britannica) explored and blurred the boundaries between traditional news journalism and nonfiction storytelling, resulting in iconic pieces of reporting published most notably in the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post. Other daily newspapers — from the Portland Oregonian to the Detroit Free Press to the St. Petersburg Times to the St. Paul Pioneer Press to the Baltimore Sun — stepped in, giving reporters the time, resources and sophisticated editorial guidance to do this work. The pieces were often long, often part of a series and usually woven through with universal human experience or emotion.

It’s hard to find much evidence of this movement in today’s shrinking newspaper landscape. As newsrooms contract and news deserts grow, magazine-style journalism is again a luxury in daily journalism. Few newspapers still publish Sunday magazines, and many have folded their features sections.

Does this mean narrative journalism in newspapers dead? With fewer newspapers, smaller staffs and the press of a 24/7 reporting cycle, you would think the answer is yes.

The answer is no.

Or rather, the answer is that the vital elements, the key components, of narrative journalism can be (and are being) incorporated into news features, investigative journalism and even breaking news. And storytelling is alive and thriving in the podcast world.

Narrative on deadline

So-called traditional journalism and the art of nonfiction narrative are not mutually exclusive. The crafting of a piece of narrative journalism and the work of reporting on deadline are not mutually exclusive. When we read a lengthy piece in The New Yorker or The Atlantic (anchors of long form narrative), we know that the work demanded days, weeks, maybe months of time and an editor who will grant that kind of time. We might think all narrative is long form. That to do it right we need words, words and more words — thousands of words. We think there will be some magic moment in our careers where we will have that time and that editor and the heady freedom of those many words, not to mention the perfect story. In the meantime, narrative is for those who write for a handful of elite magazines. In the meantime, shoulder to the wheel and fingers to the keyboard.

Allow me to disabuse you of these assumptions. I just rediscovered a glorious example of narrative written on the fly with an economy of words. This piece testifies to the short-form, deadline possibilities of narrative journalism.

It is a column written by Jimmy Breslin after he got a call at his home on December 8, 1980, that John Lennon had been shot. Breslin went out to report it. He went back to the office, the New York Daily News, to write it. It was in print and on the streets the next the next day.

This event-to-published-story speed may seem glacial now. But for a moment, forget technology. Forget that today’s Breslin — you or I — could write in the field on a phone, take photos and record audio with the same phone, upload it all and have the story posted before the ambulance bearing Lennon’s fatally wounded body reached the ER.

So forget the technology. Think instead of Breslin’s speed of thought, how astute, insightful and perceptive he was. How, in the midst of breaking news, in the chaos of an unfolding event, he saw a story. Not a “John Lennon Shot” news flash but a story — one that no one else saw. He saw it in that moment. He reported it in that moment. He wrote in on deadline.

Building a story in scenes

Breslin’s piece has everything we look for in the narrative approach to journalism: scene-setting, character development, dialog, plot, arc and detail. It has heart, but not the bleeding kind. And it does all that in less than 700 words.

Here’s how it opens:

That summer in Breezy Point, when he was 18 and out of Madison High in Brooklyn, there was the Beatles on the radio at the beach through the hot days and on the jukebox through the nights in the Sugar Bowl and Kennedys. He was young and he let his hair grow and there were girls and it was the important part of life. Last year, Tony Palma even went to see Beatlemania.

And now, last night, a 34-year-old man, he sat in a patrol car at 82nd St. and Columbus Ave. and the call came over the radio: “Man shot, 1 West 72 St..” Palma and his partner, Herb Frauenberger, rushed through the Manhattan streets to an address they knew as one of the most famous living places in the country, the Dakota apartments.

Here’s what we have so far: A snippet of culturally rich backstory. A hint of character development. A sprinkling of specifics. The inciting incident. The curtain-goes-up moment that introduces what promises to be a scene. And consider that quietly ominous end to the paragraph, a nod to the readers who, that morning, already knew what had happened the night before in front of the Dakota.

The story continues:

Another patrol car was at the scene, and as Palma got out he saw the officers had a man up against the building and were handcuffing him.

“Where’s the guy shot?” Palma said.

“In the back,” one of the cops said.

Palma went through the gates into the Dakota courtyard and up into the office, where a guy in a red shirt and jeans was on his face on the floor. Palma rolled the guy over. Blood was coming out of the mouth and covering the face. The chest was wet with blood. Palma took the arms and Frauenberger took the legs. They carried the guy out to the street.

Here’s what we have: A you-are-there scene with terse dialog, the drama of it delivered clinically. Anti-drama drama. The kind that chills you. “A guy in a red shirt.” The guy, that body — John Lennon, the focus of every other story written about that event — is in Breslin’s piece an object. Note that Breslin writes the mouth, the face, the legs — not his mouth, his face, his legs. The cops are the subject. This is their story.

The scene continues to unfold. There’s another patrol car in front of the Dakota, another cop. His name is Jim Moran, and the first thing we learn about him is that back when he joined the force in 1964 he was put on patrol guarding the Beatles at their hotel. The guy in the red shirt covered in blood? His body is put in the back of Moran’s car. Breslin writes:

 “As Moran started driving away, he heard people in the street shouting, “That’s John Lennon!”

Moran looked in the backseat and said, “Are you John Lennon?” The guy in
the back nodded and groaned.”

It reads like a short story, a polished gem of a short story. The brilliance of the piece — on deadline, remember, in the midst of a media circus, remember — is that Breslin saw the event through a storytelling lens, not a breaking news lens. He employed classic reporting skills — observation and interviewing — but in the service of story. And so what he noticed, whom he paid attention to, what he asked, what he wrote down, was different than what the news hound was doing. Story was the beginning of the process. Story framed the process.

Story was the beginning of the process. Story framed the process.

Breslin had already made a name for himself as a street reporter interested in “the little guy,” the ordinary citizens of the city; he won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in commentary for a collection of such stories. The story he saw in front of the Dakota that night in 1980 was not about the famous man who had been shot but about the cops on the scene who picked up the bleeding body, and the cops who transported that body to the hospital.

Narrative as elements and process

Breslin’s brilliance was also his simultaneously muscular and graceful practicing of the key elements of storytelling. The guy knew how to write a scene. He knew what to look for. He knew what to include and what to leave out. He knew how to pace it. He knew how and where to insert exposition. In the craft-centered essays that will follow this one in coming weeks, I’ll focus on the essential elements of narrative journalism that Breslin and others have mastered. I’ll begin with scene-setting, the heart of the enterprise, and then move on to character development, structure/plot/movement, dialog and conversation (and even, gasp, internal monolog), and finally endings.

…forget the technology. Think instead of Breslin’s speed of thought, how astute, insightful and perceptive he was.

Breslin’s piece is a showcase for all this. It is also a reminder that narrative work begins with the concept. Narrative is a lens first, an approach to reporting second, and only then a series of (very important) writing decisions. His column is also an argument in favor of the practice of “everyday” narrative journalism: shorter pieces, even deadline pieces, not waiting for the BIG story, the multi-parter, the one that takes weeks to produce.

I want to leave you with the final scene in Breslin’s column because it is that good.

Palma walked into the emergency room. Moran was there already. The doctors had John Lennon on a table in a trauma room, working on the chest, inserting tubes.

Tony Palma said to himself, I don’t think so. Moran shook his head. He thought about his two kids, who know every one of the Beatles’ big tunes. And Jim Moran and Tony Palma, older now, cops in a world with no fun, stood in the emergency room as John Lennon, whose music they knew, whose music was known everywhere on earth, became another person who died after being shot with a gun on the streets of New York.

* * * 

Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 books. 

The post John Lennon, Jimmy Breslin and (deadline) narrative as the sum of its parts appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Can the past teach us anything? Is there a reason beyond “oh, that’s interesting/ quaint/awful/who knew?” to delve into the lives of journalists who did their work before we were born, perhaps many generations before we were born?

In a word: Yes.

Here’s an analogy that may illuminate my thinking (or leave you scratching your head). I love to watch truly bad movies. Z-grade, as they are called. When you remove the glitz and glitter, the sophisticated patina, the layer upon layer of post-production magic, you can see how movies are made. You can study lighting and sound, camera angles and editing. It’s all laid bare.

Here, in what you will read below, is journalism laid bare. Here is a story of reporting that broke news before the invention of any technology we take for granted today to cover events as they happen. No Googling for quick answers or context. No Twitter to tap into ongoing conversations and identify sources. No smartphones. No phones. No printing technology to reproduce photographs. What remains?

Quick thinking. Energy. Ingenuity. Agility. Commitment to getting it right.  Commitment to readers. Teamwork. Here we see what journalism, at its core, is all about.

And this bonus: I want to introduce you to an astonishing (and long-forgotten) woman whose importance to the journalistic enterprise is inarguable. She is not one of the very few female icons — Nelly Bly and Ida Tarbell come to mind —although her last name, Leslie, may be familiar to some. I should say one of her last names. This force of nature, a 19^th century boss who remade an empire, went through four husbands. Let’s join her as she practices journalism laid bare 142 years ago.

Inheriting a news empire and a big news story

On the morning of July 2, 1881, the news came across the telegraph wires that President James Garfield had been shot. This was a time when a president of the United States could walk the streets unaccompanied by either bodyguards or an entourage. Garfield, who had taken office less than four months before, strolled from the White House to the Sixth Street Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station. There, in the waiting room, he was shot from behind at point-blank range. The first bullet grazed his shoulder. The second just missed his spinal cord and lodged itself behind his pancreas. When Miriam Leslie heard the news, she literally stopped the presses.

It had been barely 18 months since she had taken over as head of the Leslie media empire, which included the flagship publication Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, a weekly founded by her husband Frank Leslie in 1855. This was a time when newspapers were the sole sources of information about national life, when magazines mapped the cultural landscape, when the artists’ renderings and woodcuts in those pages were how people saw the world, when many important books were first published as serials in the journalistic publications of the day. Later Scripps, Hearst and Pulitzer would build reputations as media moguls, but first there was Frank Leslie — and Mrs. Frank Leslie — who led and fed the industry.

Mrs. Leslie’s given name was Miriam.

Frank, her third and now deceased spouse was the celebrated success of Publishers’ Row, the Manhattan district that was the 19^th century epicenter of newspaper and book publishing. That was his public image. But upon his death he left behind a business in shambles and almost $8 million in debt (more than a quarter-billion in today’s dollars). Creditors were demanding an immediate payment of  $50,000.

Within days Miriam, clothed in black silk and shod in silver-tipped black kid leather slippers, was sitting behind her husband’s expansive desk in her husband’s old office on the top floor of an impressive five-story building at 57 Park Place in lower Manhattan. There she looked out over the main editorial room where on one wall was mounted a large bronze medallion of the man himself.  She was now in charge of seven publications, 16 printing presses and 300 employees — engravers and artists, writers and printers, telegraph messengers, drivers and salesmen — and a mailroom that took up an entire floor of the building. She was poised to become the most powerful woman in publishing.

But first she had to save the business. (History records that Miriam briefly changed her name to Frank when she entered the male world of business. History also records that she had an active and unapologetic sex life, and was a suffragette.)

To keep the creditors at bay, she engineered a $50,000 loan from a wealthy widow, using her own remarkable jewelry collection as collateral.  Then she efficiently — some said ruthlessly — overhauled every department in the publishing empire that was now hers. She pared the list of Leslie publications. Fewer publications, each with increased readership, was her plan. She commissioned a decorative new cover for the Illustrated Newspaper, improved the quality of its printing stock and its woodcuts and sought new writers. She worked 10-hour days, returning at 8 in the evening not to the sumptuous apartments she and her third husband had occupied but to what she later described as a “carpetless flat” where she “knew what it was to be cold and hungry.”

Within 18 months of her husband’s death, she stunned Publishers’ Row by winning the lawsuits that threatened the Leslie estate, paying off his debts and expanding the circulation of the Leslie publications from 30,000 to 200,000. She did this, breathing new life into a severely compromised enterprise, by seizing a dramatic moment in American history, a moment that gripped the nation for almost three months. She did this by pioneering a new approach to the news, an immediacy we take for granted today but was not part of the 19th century world of journalism.

A bold approach to big news

On the morning of July 2, 1881, reading the telegraphed news of the attempt on President Garfield’s life, the latest edition of Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper was already in production.  Miriam ordered a halt to the presses and pulled it. Within an hour, she dispatched two artists to Washington, one of whom returned to New York on the midnight train with sketches both had prepared.  Miriam wrote, edited and formatted a new front page.

Two days later — lightning speed for the day — the newspaper was on the stands with double-page illustrations and full coverage of the tragedy. And for the 79 days that the president lay dying, first in the sweltering heat of the White House, then propped in a bed by an open window in a house on the Jersey shore, the newspaper covered the saga with reporters and artists on the scene.

Garfield’s condition fluctuated. Fevers came and went. At the White House, in the sick room, Navy engineers rigged up fans that blew air over blocks of ice to reduce the summer heat. Doctors probed the president’s body with unwashed hands and unsterilized instruments to try to locate the bullet. Alexander Graham Bell devised a metal detector to help find the bullet. (Garfield’s metal bed frame made the instrument malfunction.) The robust president’s weight dropped from 210 to 130 pounds. Through the entire, extended ordeal, the American public followed it on the pages of Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. When the end came, Leslie’s covered Garfield’s funeral procession and services with as many illustrations as it could make room for.

A journalistic style that endures

Miriam Leslie had saved the Leslie media empire. She was heralded as a “commercial Joan of Arc” and the “Empress of Journalism.” She was called “the planet star among women in public life.” She was one of the first female power brokers in America, a media mogul, a financial wizard, a globe-trotting journalist, a bestselling author, a cultural icon, and an “ill-behaved” woman who made her way to the top at a time when women were virtually invisible in public life — except when on the arm of a man.

But her enduring legacy to us is that she ushered in a new age of of-the-moment, you-are-there journalism. The journalism she pioneered, practiced, and polished — on-the-scene, in-the-moment, heavily illustrated — is now a fundamental part of story work, in many forms and on many platforms.

* * *

Lauren Kessler is an Oregon-based narrative journalist, teacher and author of 15 books. This post was based on her continuing research into Miriam Leslie for a possible biography. Her interest was first inspired by "Purple Passage: Life of Mrs. Frank Leslie," published 70 years ago.

The post How a 19th century widow stopped the presses — and pioneered deadline reporting appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

“Listen to the people who are talking about how to fix what’s wrong, not the ones who just work people into a snit over the problems. Listen to the people who have ideas about how to fix things, not the ones who just blame others.”

That’s Molly Ivins writing in “You Got to Dance With Them That Brung You.” Who doesn’t love Molly Ivins?

(That is a rhetorical question.)

Ivins was writing about politics, which she did for years with bracing intelligence liberally spiced with snark. (Political-leaning pun intended.) But she could have been making an argument for what is called solutions journalism or constructive journalism. I believe it is the kind of work we should all be doing. I believe it is the work we must be doing.

Here’s how the non-profit Solutions Journalism Network defines this approach: “…rigorous, evidence-based reporting on the responses to social problems” the mission of which is “to transform journalism so that all people have access to news that helps them envision and build a more equitable world.” You will probably agree that Molly’s version has a bit more bite to it.

Solutions Journalism may not be a household/newsroom word, but it is not a new concept. In 2010, New York Times journalists David Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg launched a column called “Fixes” that focused on solutions to problems — from affordable housing to unhealthy food in prisons —and explored whether the efforts to mitigate these problems were working. In 2013 they helped establish the Solutions Journalism Network to further this approach. In the years that followed, news outlets around the country began to publish solutions-oriented stories.

But shrinking newsrooms, vanishing news outlets and the resource-heavy burden of thoughtful, in-depth reporting like this leads me to want to reinforce the case for solutions journalism and to shout it from the (virtual) hilltops.

Limits to making people care

We live in such perilous times, enmeshed in what seem to be unsolvable problems, brought to our knees by daily tragedies, deafened by rancorous rhetoric. If there ever was a time for journalists to step up — really step up — it is now. We need to consider not just what we write about but how we write about it, how we frame it. I think the key to reporting on any persistent difficult issue facing us now and beyond is reframing how we talk about it in order to truly engage and empower our audiences.

The old approach was MAKE THEM AWARE! Tell people how bad things are, and things will change. This is often a narrative of statistics, those jaw-dropping numbers that show the impact of what we are doing to the planet, how many people are sleeping on the streets, how many opioid overdoses, how many mass shootings.

The statistics represent people. But statistics are very easy to distance oneself from. And the bigger the number, the harder it is for people to understand and relate. Here’s an example: Internet users generate about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. What does that mean? How do we wrap our minds around it? Does it matter? Should it matter?

Plus: We’re learning that statistics don’t move people. As a Forbes magazine article so cleverly put it: Why Storytelling Beats Statistics, But Only 100% Of The Time.

We have tried the make-them-aware approach by presenting readers with numbers, assaulting them with scary research and overloading them with disturbing comments from experts. If they just knew, we think. But it is increasingly obvious that this doesn’t work. Everyone who wants to know already knows. Those who don’t know (or don’t trust the “messenger”) cannot be reached or persuaded otherwise.

The next approach journalism tried was MAKE PEOPLE CARE!! Show readers that others (individuals, families, communities, etc.) are being affected by an issue or abuse, and they will care and things will change. How did we do that? Through heart-wrenching stories of disaster. We basically batter readers with trauma through words and images and sound. We also have now a generation of research that shows how this approach does not work.

In a previous essay for Storyboard, I wrote about the work of decision scientist Paul Slovic who pioneered the study of what he calls “psychic numbing” and what others of us call “compassion exhaustion.” This is actually a protective psychological response embedded in humans: How much can we care and cry and feel pain about the stories of others? It turns out there is a limit. Nonprofits have long specialized in this kind of messaging — but many of those they are trying to reach have been numbed by it. It’s not that they don’t care; it’s that there’s a limit to how much one can care.

So what can we do?

Stories can empower people

Enter solutions journalism. We need to be showing our audience — those who are already aware, those who maybe started off caring but have become psychically numb — that there are people, communities, tribes, organizations, etc. out there working on, experimenting with, learning from both successful and not-so-successful attempts to tackle the problems we all face. This is storytelling that EMPOWERS PEOPLE.

This kind of storytelling is nuanced. It is, obviously, about “solutions” and alternatives. But beneath, or maybe beyond, all that, it is about resilience and empowerment. Our audiences need to see that as individuals, as members of their families, as organizations and communities, they have power — and they can wield that power.

Readers see this when we write about solutions, when they see others exerting their power. Blasting people with dire statistics and traumatic stories actually robs them of a feeling of agency or self-efficacy. Reframing the way we tell stories can give back a sense of power and engagement.

Does this solutions approach smack of advocacy? Yes. Sort of. But what it advocates is for societal engagement — engagement with engagement with issues, involvement in community and commitment to facing and mitigating the problems that plague us. It does not advocate a political, philosophical or religious position. The “cause” it promotes is citizenship.

Also important to understand: Solutions-framed journalism is not what is criticized or dismissed as happy news or feel-good journalism. There is room for these cheerful stories, and plenty of serious publications are paying heed. Talking Heads cofounder David Byrne launched a website called “Reasons to be Cheerful,” filled with good-news content. “It often seems like the world is going straight to hell,” he told Rolling Stone. “Hell, I wake up in the morning, I look at the paper, and…often I’m depressed all day.” Columbia Journalism Review, in covering this happy landscape, reports that Mother Jones has a newsletter focusing on positive news; the Washington Post has one filled with “inspiring” stories.

But solutions journalism stories are not heart-warming, smiley-face tales of success. They are complex, up-and-down narratives of efforts made, challenges faced, dead ends encountered, bridges burned, bridges built, persistence (maybe) rewarded, lessons learned.

Lighting a path forward

A year ago, The New York Times launched an inventive, interactive twist to Solutions Journalism, an initiative called “Headway.” Its mission: “Exploring the world’s challenges through the lens of progress.” The first project to come from that initiative was “Hindsight,” a collection of stories that explore what people in the past expected the future would bring, what actually happened and what we might learn from this. It is not a simple take on philosopher George Santayana’s famous quip that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. It is far more subtle. The stories aim to help define progress, “how we measure it and how we make it,” according to the project’s launch letter by editor Matthew Thompson: “We don’t expect to find simple answers. But the pursuit itself may light the paths to our best futures.”

That, it seems to me, is one of the most empowering statements that can be made.

From Denmark comes a similar approach, the Constructive Institute: Journalism for Tomorrow, a “global hub for people who believe that journalism might be part of the problem in the trust meltdown in our democracies” – and that it (we) need to be part of the solution. Here’s how the Institute frames the approach:

We may have forgotten, or perhaps we never realized, that our best efforts to chronicle what in my J-school days we used to call the trifecta — crime, upheaval and disaster — often undermines community efforts to problem-solve. We are, in fact, part of the problem when we, with the best intentions, overwhelm and numb our readers, when our work contributes to their feeling that all is lost, that nothing can be done, that as David Byrne put it, “the world is going to hell.”

Solutions journalism is not the solution to disempowerment, disengagement, distrust and apathy on the part of too many Americans. There is no single solution.

But it is one path. And a noble role of journalism is to illuminate that path.

***

Lauren Kessler’s two most recent books, “Grip of Time: When Prison is Your Life” and “Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home,” take readers into the worlds of incarceration and reentry. She continues to correspond with and edit the work of the men in the prison writing group she founded in 2016.

The post If journalism is part of the problem, can it be part of the solution? appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

I have chronicled the road to prison traveled by a 16-year-old Black kid involved in a double murder. I have shadowed a 22-year-old dancer struggling to find her place in a professional ballet company. I have written about the parole hearing of a man serving a life sentence for stabbing his wife a dozen times, about a Vassar-educated blueblood who became a communist spy, about a former college administrator deep into dementia.

You get the idea. This is what we journalists do. We go out into the world and report and write about people who live different lives than we do — which is true someone living across the street as well as someone living in a maximum security prison.

To write honestly and meaningfully, with context and sensitivity, we must write from a place of understanding. And that understanding comes from the people themselves, those with the lived experience we are trying to capture. How do we do that?

I think the key is empathy.

Reporting beyond the cliché

Empathy is often described as the ability to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.”

This, of course, is a cliché. But more than that, it is just plain wrong-headed. Allow me to belabor this point.

How can we walk a mile, or take a single step, in someone else’s shoes? It is possible that we have never even seen shoes like this before. Do we pause to think about this? Do we ask permission to walk in these shoes? How does that person feel about strange feet inserted in their shoes? Before we attempt to slip our foreign feet into someone else’s familiar shoes, do we ask about this footwear, where it came from (a hand-me-down? an impulse-buy?), where it’s been (in the back of a closet? on a long trip?), how long it’s been worn? Do we ask how well these shoes fit the wearer? If the wearer likes these shoes? It is possible that our feet are too big or too small to fit, too narrow or too wide. Maybe we trip over the laces before we take a single step. So how is it that we can “walk a mile”?

Okay. I believe I have adequately stomped (in my own shoes) on this cliché.

So if empathy isn’t walking in someone else’s footwear, what exactly is it? And why is it essential to our work? And how might we journalists practice it?

Neither sympathy nor softness

Let’s get this out of the way first: Empathy is not a kind of softness, a squishy (read: unprofessional) attitude a journalist has toward a story, a source, a way of doing the work that undermines the veracity and clear-headedness of that work. Empathy is not agreeing with someone or being moved to tears or laughter by their experiences. It is not forging or experiencing an emotional bond. That is sympathy.

Empathy is the ability — or I would say the ongoing challenge — to try to understand another person’s point of view. This hinges on our recognition that we each see the world through a subjective lens crafted from the circumstances and experiences of our lives. If we don’t recognize this, if we think that what we see is the way it is, we have little hope of understanding others. Empathy begins with our acknowledgement of our own filter: the shoes we walk in, the shoes that are comfortable and comforting to us.

This is not a simple thing, this recognition and acceptance. For those schooled, as I was, in “objective journalism,” this can feel like a defeat. Or maybe an insult to our professionalism. It is neither. Nor is it some “woke” statement. It is simply how we humans are built. To see only through one’s own filter stands in the way of meaningful and honest storytelling. And it makes empathy impossible.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have been studying empathy in human behavior since the mid-twentieth century and have identified three categories, naming them either cognitive, emotional and compassionate; or cognitive, behavioral and affective. But really, there is no reason to get into the weeds about this.

I think it is more helpful to our work to think of empathy as either a cognitive response or an emotional response. Cognitive empathy, as you can guess, is a thinking process. It is purposeful and deliberate, a concerted attempt to understand others. It employs a journalistic skill we pride ourselves on: asking questions. To understand another person’s perspective, what is important to them, how they think about issues — what shoes they wear — we ask them, right?

Yes. But, perhaps more important, our understanding, our cognitive empathy, rests on the often ignored skill of listening, on giving others the opportunity to take the conversation where they want to take it, not where we want to direct it. We can, in short, shut up. Silence is a very powerful tool — not stony silence, not a temporary and uncomfortable pause, but inquisitive and inviting silence, a silence that beckons.

And then there is the simple (and underused) skill — and it is a skill — of simply being there. If we want to understand The Other, what better way than to watch what unfolds in their life? Oftentimes we journalists are so intent on taking action (asking questions, capturing video or audio) that to be, in Nora Ephron’s words, “the wallflower at the orgy,” feels as if we are shirking our responsibilities. We are not. Unobtrusive (I do not, emphatically, mean invasive) observation is a portal to practicing the journalism of empathy.

Building your empathy skills

The misconception is that some people are empathetic and some people are not. In fact, cognitive empathy can be learned. We can practice empathy by using verbal and nonverbal signals to show we are working to understand another person’s feelings and ideas. These are simple acts: leaning in when someone talks, nodding, looking someone in the eyes, putting down a pen. We can employ and practice empathetic techniques in the field: face-to-face time with subjects, listening with intention, taking the time to observe with an open and inquisitive mind. We can exercise our Muscle of Empathy by remaining humble and remembering whose story this is. We approach the work after diligent research, but we don’t approach our subjects as if we are the experts. They are the experts. That acknowledgement is part of the practice of empathy.

If this sounds to you like the work cultural anthropologists do, you’re right. They are, the best ones are, experts in understanding and chronicling The Other. For a book I wrote years ago about teen girl culture and mothering a 21^st century teen, “My Teenage Werewolf,” I thought of  myself as Margaret Mead in Middle School as I sat quietly in the back of classrooms and cafeterias for 18 months.

If you have, or had, a teen in your house, or if you were a difficult and mercurial teen yourself (is there any other kind?), you may have felt emotional empathy for me when you read the above paragraph. This is quite different than cognitive empathy. Emotional empathy is likely a personality trait, although it can certainly be nourished or quashed by upbringing and circumstance. Feeling the same emotion as another person, feeling distress in response to another’s plight, feeling compassion for what they are experiencing — these are the components of emotional empathy. It may be that we experience these feelings during the course of our reporting. But feeling — or not feeling — these emotions is not a part of the Journalism of Empathy. Emotional empathy, when it occurs, can make us feel uncomfortable, a sign that we’ve gotten too close to our subject and have jeopardized our impartiality.

I am not sure that’s true. I am not sure that compassion, which is really what emotional empathy is, stands in the way of good journalism. In fact, it may be lack of compassion that is the problem. In a sharply divided world where people not only don’t understand each other but won’t even talk to each other, it seems that a core mission of our work should be to help make us knowable to one another. To do that we don’t shove our (perhaps unwelcome) feet in someone else’s shoes. We don’t take over someone else’s story. We don’t pretend to be experts when we haven’t lived the experience. We don’t pretend not to have feelings. We listen and watch. We practice humility and silence. We stay fully human as we do our job.

We embrace empathy.

***

Lauren Kessler’s two most recent books, “Grip of Time: When Prison is Your Life” and “Free: Two Years, Six Lives, and the Long Journey Home,” are deep dives into the worlds of incarceration and reentry. She continues to correspond with and edit the work of the men in the prison writing group she founded in 2016.

The post What empathy is, and isn’t, in journalism appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.