Can you write in segments?

Not for grad school, 93Devil, but I feel your pain. There's a world of difference between writing tight, concise newspaper stories and the long-winded, overanalyzed stuff they expect in academic writing.


and on the segment question, in a perfect world, I like to sit down and write top to bottom. Almost always, I have a decent idea of what angle I want to take before I start writing, so on occasion I'll write the meat of the story and then go back and figure out exactly how I want to word the lede.

 

I've done stories in all sorts of different manners. Because running stories are usually drier than month-old toast, I tend to write my little bricks and pour the mortar at the end or around deadline. At a previous stop, I had no choice ... deadlines didn't allow for much of anything else.

The six months before I got in the biz full time were so critical. I learned not to let not having a lede stop me. Write from the middle. Write from the bottom. Unless it's a short capsule, the thoughts will appear somewhere in the story, so better to type them down and worry about something else. When I do stuff in this format, the lede will eventually emerge.

In summary, there's no definitive answer. Different stories and different games tend to lean to different styles.

 

Hard as fucking hell...

 

The lede is always the last thing I write.

 

Thank God for Copy and Paste. I'll write blocks of the story, then organize it in a way that makes sense and write some transitional sentence or paragraph. If that doesn't work, in-story subheads! Then maybe I'll figure out a fetching lede to draw readers in.

 

Like a lot of people, apparently, I like to write top down. Usually I have a lead in mind before the game's over and it's just a matter of getting the wording right. If I'm not on a tight deadline, this happens in the car back to the office.
I only write as the game goes if it's a really tight deadline and I have to. I've found this works fine for baseball and hockey, OK for basketball, not well at all for football.
In those cases, if it's a close game, I'll have two or three different leads written out based on how the game might end (best example was a late state basketball game that went like 6 OTs), then I have most of the body written, just need stats and a few tweaks based on which of the leads I use.
I rarely feel as good about those stories as I do the ones that I write top-down when I turn them in, but if I give them a few days and go back an reread them, I'm surprised to find that they actually turned out well.

 

Use the story's nut graf as the central theme and build around it. The lede will become one of the easiest parts of the story to write, as it flows right to the nut graf.

 

Absolutely. I'd never get anything done if I waited

Not yet, but I write my newspaper stories in the same way I used to write papers. I start with facts or good quotes -- usually highlighted on pages of transcripts or game notes -- and build around 'em.

I've had this same debate with a good friend of mine for years, because she needs the lede to write anything else. I love cut-and-paste. Sure, I sometimes completely rewrite when I get inspired, but I also don't have to wait for that inspiration to strike to get the story done.

 

I can't imagine how people write a story without having the lede -- or at least sense of what it's going to be. The lead sets up everything and is supposed to be what draws in the reader. Slapping one as almost afterthought seems like a recipe for a story that ... seems slapped together as an afterthought.

 

This is true. Even though I almost always write top-to-bottom -- meaning I physically type the lead first -- in actuality I've already gut the nut graf in my head and I'm writing toward that.

So, in essence, I write the nut graf first -- in my head -- even though the first words typed on screen will be the lead.

 

I'm like IJAG. I need a lede to flow from, so I usually just write a working lede -- something horrible that I'll delete later. If it's a sport where I have time to write (i.e. baseball, volleyball, soccer) I'll end up making four or five ledes by the time the game's over. It's terribly ineffiecient (about 1,000 words for a 600-word article), but effective.

 

I have written a number of stories -- and one book -- from the ending backwards. I love endings. If you get a good one, it's like you can hear this big iron door slam.
I find it difficult to write in segments, particularly when my head is at the desk and my hands are in the other room, making a sandwich.