Recreating a scene

OK, here's another. Again there's no writer's name attached. The savvy among you, though, can easily figure it out if'n it's that important. The reason I share this is that the example above is painting a picture of a single moment that becomes illustrative of the larger story. In the example below, it's a series of examples, each with a single take-notice detail that carries the reader along from paragraph to paragraph. Eventually your 10 graphs into the story and totally invested in finishing it. Let me know what y'all think ....


Mike Webster never made it to his son's 10th birthday party in Lodi, Wis. Lying in a dark room at the Budgetel Inn, some 20 minutes away in Madison, he was bed-bound in a haze of pain and narcotics, a bucket of vomit by his side.

Webster was often laced with a varying, numbing cocktail of medications: Ritalin or Dexedrine to keep him calm. Paxil to ease anxiety. Prozac to ward off depression. Klonopin to prevent seizures. Vicodin or Ultram or Darvocet or Lorcet, in various combinations, to subdue the general ache. And Eldepryl, commonly prescribed to patients who suffer from Parkinson's disease.

After 17 seasons in the National Football League, Webster had lost any semblance of control over his once-invincible body. His brain showed signs of dementia. His head throbbed constantly. He suffered from significant hearing loss. Three lumbar vertebrae and two cervical vertebrae ached from frayed and herniated discs. A chronically damaged right heel caused him to limp. His right shoulder was sore from a torn rotator cuff. His right elbow grew stiff from once being dislocated. His knees, the cartilage in them all but gone, creaked from years of bone grinding against bone. His knuckles were scarred and swollen. His fingers bent gruesomely wayward.

"He was too sick to come to my birthday party. He didn't even call me and I was mad," Garrett Webster remembered recently. "Now, I understand that there was something wrong."

Ten years later, there is only a faint strain of resentment in his voice. His father, the celebrated Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, is gone now. Still, the mental snapshots, those harrowing memories, persist of the stoic man they called Iron Mike:

<bu>Desperate for a few moments of peace from the acute pain, repeatedly stunning himself, sometimes a dozen times, into unconsciousness with a black Taser gun. "The only way he could get to sleep," said Garrett.

<bu>Glassy-eyed like a punch-drunk boxer, huddled alone, staring into space night after night at the Amtrak station in downtown Pittsburgh. "Living on potato chips and dry cereal," said Joe Gordon, a Steelers employee.

<bu>A formidable man, at 6-foot-2 and 250 pounds, who sometimes forgot to eat for days -- sleeping in his battered, black Chevy S-10 pickup truck, a garbage bag duct-taped over the missing window. "Sometimes he didn't seem to care," said Sunny Jani, the primary caregiver the last six years of his life.

<bu>Writing wandering journals in a cramped, earnest hand so convoluted in their spare eloquence that, upon reading them in his lucid moments, he would be moved to weep. "You had absolutely no idea what was going through his mind," said Colin, his oldest son.

<bu>The powerfully proud former athlete, anguished and curled up in a fetal position for three or four days, puzzling over his life, contemplating suicide and, in later years, placing those sad, rambling calls, almost daily in the later years, to friends and family when he couldn't find his way home. "All I see is trees," he'd say apologetically, almost in a whisper.

When Webster died in Pittsburgh on Sept, 24, 2002, at the age of 50, the official cause was heart failure. That was absurd, of course. Few players showed more heart than Webster in his marvelous 17-year NFL career. In the end, his body and brain left him a defeated man.

 

it was a dark and stormy night ...

 

Sportsed: until jgmacg checks in on this thread, you are my new favorite poster. Awesome stuff with both stories.

 

Apparently that's all you need to know about recreating a scene, Flood. Good luck.

For the life of me, I don't understand why topics like this aren't more popular. In fact, it was this very thread that prompted me to begin posting comments to this site after years of sitting out the mindless banter over the most frivolous things in our business.

Here, we have an opportunity to discuss how to hone our craft, yet few people seem interested in a little give and take on a subject that should hit home for all of us.

 

I absolutely love the detail in these paragraphs. If nothing else, and I hope this thread continues, I have learned that I need to do much more than simply touch the surface in my questions.

You do not find out that sort of information by simply asking, "What was wrong with your body?" I guess I just want to know more. I want to know the approach the interviewer took in getting all of the information he/she needed to build such an intriguing opening. Nobody could pick that up and not be hooked.

 

Maybe Jones will weigh in. He has some good suggestions on this same topic in a different thread that I can't recall at this time.

 

The Webster story, I believe, is based primarily on court documents that included medical records. The reporter went back to the various sources and got the anecdotal details.

 

This isn't exactly the first thread around here soliciting help for a narrative or scene-setter.
Examples are in the Writers' Workshop and deeper on this board.

 

How to (p)recreate a scene when you weren't really there?

Why, I thought you'd never ask.

 

A while back, we kind of broke down W.C. Heinz's Death of a Racehorse -- in my opinion, the best piece of deadline writing ever -- and we tried to figure out what made it work.

It's hard to know, because it's one of those pieces you just take in like breath, but I think what sets it apart is the perfect level of detail -- those bits of information that, when combined, paint a complete picture... Maybe even more complete than if the reader were standing in the middle of the action himself. Because writers have the advantage of time and reflection -- we can filter. We can edit what our readers see, taking out the cluttler and the grain and producing, if we're lucky, just a crystal clear image.

So, when setting a scene, I think it's important to include the details that make it -- but it's just as important to exclude the details that don't.

Let's look at the water bottle scene above.

I don't know about anyone else, but that lede, I can see that bottle perfectly, almost in slow motion, almost like the first shot of a movie, close-in. That's because there's good detail -- the blades of grass, the sloshing (the attention paid to two or more of our senses, which is important) -- but not so much that we're bogged down.

Then, the quote from the football coach. I can hear exactly how he said that.

It's the third graf that seals it, in my mind. There's no pat description of the football field, because we know what one looks like already: They all look the same. We don't know what the kid is wearing. We don't know what color his hair or his eyes are. We know he doesn't have arms, but we're spared most of the gore. We don't even know if it's sunny or rainy or cloudy; we just know it's hot.

But we know it's hot enough for his thirst to seem desperate.

And then when the kid gets that bottle, for me, the key descriptive downnote is that the water splashes into his mouth but also over his face. He's still clumsy, but he's quenched his thirst with probably the best tasting water of his life. We haven't been told that, of course. We've been shown it.

That's the cliche about these things -- show, don't tell -- but it's true.

Again, though, the trick is knowing just what to show. It's understanding what matters, what key words affect people, what senses need to be tripped, what experiences we all share that can give anchor to what is otherwise an apparition, just words on white space.

And again, sometimes the bigger trick is knowing what to leave out.

As for the gruntwork of it, how to get the info, I usually tell my subject that I might ask some weird questions. But if I have them setting a scene for me, I usually don't interrupt to say, "What were you wearing?" or whatever. I take the story as they give it to me, and then I'll go back and ask them to help me fill in the blanks. Usually you end up with more information than you need. That's when the filtering comes in. There, I find that writing without looking at my notes is helpful. My memory is my first editor -- if it's stuck in my mind, hearing the story, then it's going to stick in the minds of my readers. Then I might bolster it a bit with a few choice details, mortar in the bricks. And I'll try to get a little poetic if I can: If the sun is setting, I'd rather write (and read) that the shadows were long or that ballcaps were pulled low. And I try to keep it simple, spare.

You ever notice that if it's raining in a story, that always seems important, but nobody cares if it was partly cloudy, 15 percent chance of precipitation, winds out of the north-northeast?

That's the nut of it, right there.

 

Ask the guy detailed questions. If you are taping the interview, type up the notes (which I think every journalists should do if they take tape for a feature. That , or exhaustive note taking). This is the style I like the best. It puts the reader in the action. I am not one for being clever and funny, so if you can do it right it can be a great story.

Ask the guy to describe what happened. Then, go to someone else and ask them what they saw from their view of the play or game. When you meld these two types of views together you get a great story. Then you can seamlessly pick between viewpoints and weave it into a vignette.

 

Loved Jones' contribution. Anyone else have something like that to share?