Stories That Have Broken You

Try this one on. I was once in midstream, about a year and a half into writing a book, my first significant, major publisher book, when my editor left and I was reassigned to another editor. Met with him for lunch. I had 150,000 words in my hand, what turned out to be about half the first draft of what later ended up being a 250,000 word book.

Handed it to him. He glanced at it, dropped it on the floor and sniffed, "This is a picture book. I want maybe 20,000 words."

I walked out, stunned. Career done. A year and a half wasted. Started drinking. Kept drinking. Twelve hours later I e-mailed my former editor, and was surprisingly lucid. She called me the next morning, said to hang loose, she was making some calls. The publisher called me an hour later, apologized. Pulled the editor off the project.

The book eventually built my house. But it was one hell of a 24-hours, one I care never to repeat.

That being said, every time I finish a book, I feel like there are no words left in me, nothing with a shred of originality, the most innocuous phrase sounds contrived, the most un-innocuous sounds pretentious.

It takes 6-12 months for me to write long-form again, for the language to refresh. It's like my brain goes dry, no blood flows through my fingers.

 

Small daily. Small town with plant that is a major military supplier. I'm playing golf with a guy who works at the plant. He asks me why we aren't writing about a federal criminal and civil investigation going on at the plant. Tells me the company has the paper in its back pocket. I say bullshit, send me someone. Someone comes forward. The plant is shipping illegal parts. Tells me how it's happening. After about two weeks of research and interviews, I write the story. It's a blockbuster. All hell breaks loose. I feel good, except for one thing, AP doesn't pick up the story - we sent it to them. A week later, largest paper in the state runs its version of the story. They offer no new information. AP naturally picks it up. It goes national. Approximately one year later after a series of folos, whistleblowers have come to trust me. They're naming names. They're telling me who has been called before the federal grand jury. Whistleblowers claim their tires have been slashed, that they're being followed. I know it to be true because I watched a car follow a guy who was meeting me to talk. I spend about a month working the story. It is unbelievably long. But I'm proud of it. I was able to track down a private investigator who had been sitting in a car watching a whistleblowers home. Good stuff. My boss sends it to the company lawyer to check it out. It gets spiked. Not because there were legal problems, but because the lawyer tells my boss he doesn't believe it. My ME and I keep pushing until it gets printed approximately 3 months later. Company settles with the government about two years later for $12.5 million (they didn't do anything wrong, they just want to move on). Attorneys for the whistleblowers set me up with interviews. I write what I feel like is the definitive post mortum. Again, big city paper runs their version. AP ignores us, feeds the wire big city version. AP sucks.

 

W33, who gives a shit about AP? Sounds like you kicked that story's ass.

 

Whiskey and Lucky Strikes eased the pain for me.
It's not the stories that rip my guts out. It's the things I remember from them:
-- Blood on the pavement and in the snow after a bar fight turned fatal
-- Bagpipes at a fireman's funeral (I heard them in my sleep for the next week)
-- The old man saying "I hope they kill the guy who killed my wife."
-- A defense lawyer putting together a slide show of his client with his daughter to "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" by Green Day in the hopes that it'll make the jury not sentence him to death (it did)
-- A woman wailing to high heaven as they pull her husband's body out of a restaurant that got shot up.
THAT'S the shit that sticks to me, and led me back into sports.
God willing, I'll never cover a murder-suicide again.

 

The story didn't break me, but the reporting did.

My editor got the wonderful idea to do a huge package on senior citizen sports in our county.

So for months I was interviewing shuffleboard players, water aerobicizers, sitting in on yoga classes, nursing a diet coke while watching a senior bowling competition, etc., etc.

Some of the sports/people were decent but many were just old guys puttering around. If I could have focused in on the interesting ones, it would have been fine, but the editor wanted everything covered.

It got to the point I could barely force myself to go to that shuffleboard interview or pick up the phone again.

The only highlight was getting pawed at the senior yoga class.

 

Sounds like W33 did a great job with the story. In a way, it's a compliment that the big paper chased after your work.

I'd use that story and the follow-up stories in your clips package if I were you.

 

Within my first year working part-time at a major daily, age 23 and less than 2 years out of J-school, I had an editor assign me a story on a scouting service. You know, one of those companies that, for a fee, will promote a HS athlete to colleges using video/resume/portfolio to help them get noticed for a scholarship. Turns out my editor had a hell of an axe to grind with the owner of the company because they used to work together in that business and my editor thought he'd been screwed. So he gives me a bunch of background and a few filthy facts to get me started, and wants it to be a 50-inch investigative centerpiece. I write the story as fairly as I can, and he starts insisting on re-writes until the story becomes an absolute slam on the whole industry, with his former partner as the poster child. He's editing in loaded adjectives all over the place, cutting quotes that defended the service, etc. It was as one-sided as it could be. And that business can be pretty filthy and it was worthy of being exposed, but it was highly uncomfortable working for an editor with a clear agenda. This guy held my future in the business in his hands (or so I thought), and being right out of college, my course of action was to do exactly what he wanted and not complain or go over his head. At that paper at that time, if you were a part-timer who wanted to be full-time, you toed the line for editors and worked as many hours as you were asked to work no matter what the timecard showed. And you damn sure didn't run to HR.

As the re-writes continued, it became more and more the editor's story and less and less mine. But of course he wanted to hide behind my byline in the end. The story pretty much ruined the local agent for the service who didn't even have a dog in the fight. He was a nice guy who I used for a lot of basic facts. Felt bad about that. If I could go back in time, I would have gone to HR or the managing editor or told the editor to write the thing himself. Young as I was, I didn't even realize how out of line this editor had been until much later.

 

"If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries." -- Bill Parcells, via FOTF

I would say the story that broke me was Bob Knight's flirtation with leaving Indiana for New Mexico in the summer of 1988, when I was SE of the Indiana Daily Student. On one hand, it was all the excitement and exposure I could want. Major national story, interviews of myself in the New York Daily News and on WFAN, a big-boy AP award for my coverage. On the other hand, it made me seriously question if I wanted to spend my life writing for the sort of audience that rose up in protest to tell Knight to stay, the people stupid enough to march on the IU president's house when he wasn't home. I had had a few nagging thoughts that maybe I wasn't so sure I wanted to stay in sports, but the Knight stuff brought it home. That fall, as I interviewed John Feinstein when he stopped in Bloomington in a book tour, I embarassingly poured my heart out to him about this, as if he gave a fuck. (Not to impugn Feinstein. He might have cared to his soul. But I'm sure I came off sounding insane.)

That, and the lousy economy of the early 90s, sent me off the sportswriting path, and for a while off the journalism path.

 

An update: Did another edit this morning, somehow managed to add to the length, and said fuck it and filed. Now I wait, fearing the worst. I think I can hear my editor whimpering from here.

However, this thread has served its purpose wonderfully. With every post, my smile grows wider.

Of course, a little piece of my soul dies along with it, but hey.

 

"It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great."

--Jimmy Dugan

 

Which brings me to one I carry in my limited space between ears:

"When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt."
--Henry John Kaiser