Running 2023-24 NCAA Basketball Thread

"Joe Schmoe stood at the foul line. He bounced the ball three times, spun it in his hands, and focused on the inscription "Spalding." Everything rode upon this shot. How did he get here? How did WE get here?
The story had begun 31:54 of clock time before, but in many ways the story began on another court, in another town, in another year ...

 

Further, anything that could be mistaken for a score must appear after the final score. That’s great that you want to mention the crucial 18-4 run coming out of halftime, but it still belongs after the final score.

 

Yep. That was part of the rule: No partial scores, no quarter scores, no scoring runs,, none of that. The first score you see in the story should be the final score of the game.

You can use all that other stuff all you want, once you deliver the final score. We ain't running Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine here, we don't get brownie points for forcing the readers to use deductive reasoning and forensic game reconstruction to figure out what the final score was.

 

Over the years we did have some, believe it or not, intelligent debates on the subject; some newly-minted Hemingways in training held the rules were arbitrary and crushed creativity, and of course fired back, "don't you ever break these rules yourself?"

And the answer was, "yeah sure, I break them all the time ... well, no not really, probably more accurately I would say I break them "once in a while." "

The thing is, yes it is possible to write stories using narrative leads, exposition, all that good stuff, but newspaper game writing, editing and even reading, is all fast food: it has to be served fresh and hot.

In order to write (and edit) more complex stories with non-linear chronology, multiple themes, it takes time and space you usually don't have in daily newspapers (this is even more true now -- plus of course you probably have far fewer -- if any -- people "editing"stories.)

And if you try stuff like that without everybody in the writing-editing chain being aware of what you're doing, and everybody's in a big hurry too, chances are real good somebody's going to edit out a key paragraph somewhere, maybe the story gets cut for space and your well-conceived payoff graf that ties the whole kaboodle together gets cut off the end and the whole thing turns into dog food.

Anyway, I had the last word, and I said, "on game stories that are being written and edited on deadline, I want the final score to be the first score in the game story, and I want it in the top three grafs."

 

Gracious sakes.
Memphis/Wichita State today.
Two teams combined…..32-55 from 3. Memphis made 19 out of 30.
112-86 Memphis.

 

Seriously, I'm with you 100%. Used to give my guys a paragraph count to get that final score in too, lest they get too busy making love to their own lede.

 

I didn't know Steven Izzo played for his dad until today. And yet, damned if this didn't make me swallow hard. It sure did for Tom.

The good stuff begins at 0:55.

 

Game capsule haiku?

 

And I'll take this a step further.

I don't care if you can write the equivalent of a 47" game story online -- you don't need to. You're making the reader work too hard to get all he's looking for. Don't make me chase the final score. Don't get caught up in your own creativity.

Write a fucking game story.

 

Yep.
In a way this whole discussion is really very quaint and kinda sad; there are pretty much no newspapers anywhere which devote any substantial space to game stories, or for that matter, produce them in a time context in which they would be relevant, anymore.

So the whole argument over whether game stories should be minimalist and utilitarian, brutally functional: the five W's and nothing more -- or a more literary presentation which conveys information on a more extensive level, is all moot.

 

Don't sleep on Dalton Knecht as National POY when it's all said and done this season.

 

He'll get beaten out by some Michigan slug who "plays good defense."