Stories That Have Broken You

My other story that got to me was more along the lines of some of the others on this thread.

A few years back I went to cover a high school basketball game. I was there really early. Had never been to the place before and wanted to make sure I didn't get lost.

I watch the place fill up. Packed house. Then I realize warm-ups should have started but they have not. People start to get restless and I find out there is a delay, but no story why yet.

Then word gets around that two of the home team's player aren't there yet. Everybody I would know to ask what's up disappears. This is the night I truly realized how omnipresent cell phones are, because you could just see the news spreading through the crowd.

First we find out that there had been a car accident and both players were hurt. Then I start seeing people cry. I watched this huge crowd and I see these little pockets of grief....and the ripple effect slowly fills the room. Both of them had been killed in the accident.

So, I do my job. I grab the AD and confirm what I'm hearing. My cell phone rings. My office calling. One of the news guys had found out about the accident. They tell me to get what I can and come back.

Here I am, the only reporter in the building where something big has happened and I'm absolutely sick for these people. I had dealt with stories about lost loved ones before, but being in the moment is so raw, so different. I manage to interview a couple of people. A parent of another player. A student who is managing to stay composed.

A security guard realizes there is a reporter in the building and throws me out. I go back to the office and write my part of the story and just give it to the news guy as instructed. I don't even read it. Still haven't read it.

I did my job, but I wonder how reporters who deal with stories like that all the time cope. That's not me. I did a lot of thinking after that night if journalism was right for me. I know I can do it if I have to, but I wouldn't ever want to deal with something like that again.

 

The closest I can come to a story like outofplace's second story was the one time I've written an obit.

I had just finished my last (official) semester as a member of the Big School Daily and was working on a story about something I now forget. It wasn't all that important of a story and the paper would eventually run it in one of its summer issues. Talk about evergreen...

Anyway, just a few days after I'd moved into an apartment with some roommates, the newly-named news editor calls the apartment, talking to the roommate he got along with (the other roommate did not like him, but that's another story).

I was asleep because I was zonked from working at this internship I had started. Before I know it, the roommate who'd fielded the editor's call knocks on my door and tells me he's on the phone. Normally, I go apeshit if someone wakes me up unless someone's died. The only exception I've made in the past is if I'm on deadline. I wake up and answer the call.

Since the paper was a big five day a week paper, it had a rule where a writer couldn't work on more than one story at a time. However, the news editor was in a bind. A student had just died three weeks away from graduation and he didn't want to assign the story to just anyone. He wanted someone who could handle the story with the right mix of professionalism and compassion. The name he kept coming back to was mine.

I agreed to do the story, even though it would take time from my new internship to chase down some of the details. What I didn't count on was how wrenching talking to the family and the best friend of the deceased would be. It was hard, especially feeling a sense that I was right at the limit of where their patience with my questions was ending.

As I mentioned before, the previous story I'd been working on got pushed back to run several weeks into the summer. This story hit the finals week issue. I also wrote the staff editorial even though I wasn't in the editors' meeting and hadn't participated in the discussion (that became fairly typical of that semester, yet another story for another time).

I don't know if I could honestly deal with writing an obit after my one experience. At least I got moved laterally in the finals week masthead for my troubles...

 

I feel broken after reading all of these stories. :-\

Perhaps strangely, I felt this way after a story of mine was very well received. Last year I wrote a 2,500-word piece on the wife of a football player who was putting her life back together a few months after her husband had died. I had so much information I felt like I could have written 10,000 words. Even a year later, people tell me how much that story touched them. The problem was that I felt I couldn't do any better. I'm just now starting to realize that I can't compare every story I write to that one.

 

My first job out of college, I worked city-side at a small-town afternoon daily. One morning, I sit down at my desk and get told to chase down a fatal accident about 20 miles to the miles to the north. A family was driving back from the county fair when the car suffered a freak break down and swerved into the oncoming lane and was hit by an oncoming truck.

Four dead - the 24-year-old mother. The 15-year-old babysitter the mother brought along as a thank-you for all the work she had done for the family. The two kids - ages 5 and 3.

Working on a tight deadline, I had to call the families. The babysitter's family hung up on me (not that I, for a second, blame them). The grandmother of the kids, the mother of the dead mom, gave me some of the me most heartbreaking quotes I've gotten in my career.

Filed the story, went back to my apartment, and wept like a baby.

 

Hemingway, as usual, nails it. Same for Kindred, come to think of it.

I don't even think it has to be long-form to leave you empty and drained. Anything you pour yourself into is going to do that.

The one long story I always wish I'd had back was a tick-tock on the downfall of a Hall of Fame college coach here. I had a lot of good stuff, but because we wanted it out the day of the retirement announcement, the writing was rushed and ended up being pretty pedestrian. Little more than a chronology that, with another day's work, could have really drawn the reader in. You know how things almost always read a little better in print the next day? This one didn't. I didn't even bother with the jump.

The last decent length piece I wrote was about a remarkable kid here, Wesley Korir, who went home to Kenya for Christmas and wound up getting caught up in the violence there, drafted into a tribal band, saw three guys hacked to death with machetes, compelling stuff. I came away worried, again, that the writing might not have been to the level of the story. But the kid and story were so good, I almost didn't want to get in the way of it.

I'd been excited to write that story. Even more after the interview I did with the kid. I wasn't even completely displeased with the final piece. But I didn't have the rush I thought I'd have when it was done. Instead I was depressed.

But almost 20,000 words? That's a lot to have to hit the "send" button on. I'd only say that, amid the obsession, don't completely rule out the possibility that what you've done is outstanding. Sometimes when you get buried so deep in a piece, you really don't know.

Oh, and Jones, here's a final one for you about a story that got away.

My mom keeps asking me if I've seen the kid in the local marching band, the one who is being pushed in a wheelchair. Hell no. I'm back in the press box discussing the first half during the halftime show. I don't know that I'd ever seen a band performance. My dad's a metro columnist here. Asked me three times if I wanted to do the story. "Nope." I said. "All yours." Turns out the kid and his dad are a great story.

He writes it. A week later, Rick Reilly emails him saying he'd like to take a crack at it. Kid winds up on World News Tonight, Good Morning America, freaking Oprah! He was on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition last weekend.

And with every new splash, I get a playful reminder from home that "some people have a nose for a story, and some people don't."

I'm going to bed.

 

Drago has never gotten the better of me on a story, but after reading the posts here I'm beginning to think it's because I've never had to write about the things you folks have.

You all have my respect.

 

I covered a car wreck where four kids were killed. Van, with eight kids in it, driven by a 16-year-old, misses a curve and winds up in a grove of trees. It was on deadline, and I rode with the photographer, and on the way out we hear that three were dead. My notes looked like an EKG. I didn't see dead kids (thank goodness), but the driver's mom (I found out later) was standing right next to me asking for info about her son. They told her to go to the hospital.

I didn't sleep for the next few nights and when I did, it wasn't pleasant.

The next winter, a soccer player died of cancer. A freelancer I was using pitched the story, and after I approved it I was told we couldn't use freelancers for anything. So I called the mom, who had called the freelancer, and she asked me if I wanted to go to the funeral. I passed. Probably shouldn't have. But I did go to her house a day or two after, with flowers from the funeral still in the house. It turned out to be a great story, but when I was talking to one of the girl's friends, she asked me a question that still haunts me.

"Did you," she said, "have the privilege of knowing Becky?"

And my heart stopped. I mean, what better tribute can there be from a friend?

 

You're among the fortunate ones.

 

High school football player I'd based a solid chunk of the tab around (his team, or course) died within months of the tab being released. Kid was driving (illegally) and wrecked his car shortly after dropping off his girlfriend.

That was sad, but a strong portion of the original interview included how the kid and his dad were best friends. Dad has asked the kid early on what he wanted with his life. Kid answered that it was to be the best at something, whether it included football or basketball or just being a great human being. Dad gave up hours at work and pretty much dedicated his life to his son. Some considered him living vicariously though his son, but I (normally a heavy, heavy cynic) didn't this time.

Fast forward to kid's funeral. Dad is sitting outside the church after nearly everyone in this small town has packed into and needed two spare rooms with CCTV. He has three photos of his son in his hands and is ignoring everything around him.

I watch for several minutes, trying to keep it together.
Then, at the cemetary, dad is again staring at the photos after having walking away from the hundreds of people. I approach him, hardly as a journalist.

I tell him the of some of the things his son had said about him that never found there way into print -- how his dad was his reason for living, how he'd already learned at 15 how to be a good person. His dad grabs me and gives me a hug that has been topped emotionally only few times in my life, and all by either my wife or my grandmother.

It's the only time in my professional career that I felt I "owed" it to the person I was writing about to make it perfect.

 

A few years ago, I did a multi-part feature on several aspects of drug testing and blood doping in a prominent sport shortly after doing a multi-part, "Where are they now?" series on the X anniversary of one of local MLB team's big seasons. It was as fried as I've ever felt, and a desker at the last minute inserted a bad error into one of the drug stories that eliminated it from clip status and generally broke me for a few weeks.

Now, as a college beat guy, the tail end of hoops season combined with spring football, after you've been busting you ass since August ... that also sucks.

 

Sorry to hear that one, outofplace. I'd like to think if I were your ME, I'd have let the assistant metro editor have it for over-editing. I chide my reporters for over-editing for doing far less than what you described.

 

Mr Jones,

My standard tuppence on purely technical rather than emotional-content lines: Stories that editors have handed you are the ones that kill you; stories you pitch and drum up yourself are ones that you're prepared to write and consciously or sub-consciously know how to start and finish. Many disasters over the years but the worst are always when I try to follow someone else's recipe. If I'm not competely onside with a feature coming down from an editor, I want it all clarified and settled up front--turned down an assignment and a decent payday last week even tho' the editor said he "didn't think we're that far apart." I told him that we can't even agree on that.

This is an awful thing to say at this pt but it has worked or me in the past: You can push what you've done aside and try outlining fresh. Not that you have to rewrite or whatever. But just the exercise will maybe help crystallize a few ideas ... even if you go back to your original draft.

It's sort of shocking but I didn't find it hard to write about my mother's death and my parents' racism. Probably more value as therapy than journalism.

YD&OHS, etc