Stories That Have Broken You

Mr Jones,

All I can say is, if it's 17,000 words on Barry Zito I'm going to plotz.

YD&OHS, etc

 

Any more updates on the story?

 

Damn.

 

Well, it's about Barry Zito.

Naw. It's all done, gone to press. This is the worst time for a magazine writer -- the lag between finishing a story and seeing it published. With us, it's about five weeks. It sucks ass, either way. If you have a story you're excited about, you're worried that someone else is going to write it before yours comes out or the circumstances of the story are going to change. If you have a story you hate, it just stretches out the agony of it.

I'm excited about the story. The big boss sent me a nice email about it, which he's done twice before in my time at the magazine, so that's a good sign. I still think there was more I could have done, but I'm not sure what. I haven't read it since we put it to bed. I don't think I'll read it again for a long while.

I'm hoping that it gets read and people talk about it -- not here, in general. That's hard to gauge though. Sometimes I've slaved over something and it disappears without a whisper. Sometimes I scratch something out in ten minutes on the back of a napkin and I get bags of mail. There's just no telling.

The story is called, The Things That Carried Him. It's in the May issue, out probably the second week of April. The title makes me nervous on a bunch of fronts, but especially the Tim O'Brien reference. I'm re-reading The Things They Carried now, and that's a home run.

I think I hit a stand-up double, maybe legged out a triple. I did not hit a home run. I tried hard to, but they'll tell you that trying too hard usually fucks it up.

I'll wait and wait and wait and see.

 

Let me add one story to the list.

Nearly two weeks ago, I'm getting ready to do a feature on two 15-year-old boys who are getting the opportunity to play tennis at Madison Square Garden. They are going to be the undercard for the exhibition match between Pete Sampras and Roger Federer.

I've watched a few tennis matches here and there. Just enough to have a basic understanding of terms and have a decent idea of what's going on when I watch events such as the U.S. Open, but I've never tried to write a story about it.

Admittedly, it's not a gamer, but for me, it's worse: It's a feature. If there is one thing I have never felt comfortable about writing, it's features. When my first-ever feature for my community college rag just didn't work, I developed a mental block about doing them that has scarcely abated over the years that have intervened since that awkward effort. I flat out don't feel that good about them when I write them.

Now, I'm not only writing the type of story I struggle with, but I'm writing about a sport that's foreign territory to me. At least when I did a women's lacrosse gamer, I knew how to write gamers, and I hoped I could get enough of what was going on to convey what happened. However, I felt like a sailing ship hitting a storm and being forced to take in her sails or risk losing her mainmast.

I went to Wikipedia to learn some basics about the sport so I wouldn't feel lost if the answers I was getting were more technical than I'd otherwise feel comfortable with. As I conducted the interview with the boys and the coordinator of the program, I was relieved I'd done that. I heard terms and I understood them. I was even able to ask questions that made the coordinator say he though I played the game.

As relieved as the interviews made me feel, however, I just did not know how I was going to write the thing. I was really out of my element now. I finally decided to try a lede approach I normally don't when I determined to write at least the first piece of the story, which became roughly one quarter of my finished product. However, the clock kept ticking ... ticking ... ticking ... and it was finally 11:30 p.m. when I decided I would go the best I could with it and finish this story that was now taunting me.

I wanted to get the story across the right way. I wish I could say I felt confident that I succeeded. I don't. I still don't, even two weeks later. Even though the reporter who turns into a copy editor on deadline day raved about it, and raved about my lede. I still can't help thinking I screwed it up.

Yet, the show must go on. And yes, it will live on in infamy on the Internet. It was one of last week's Webbies (my paper picks four stories that we judge as our best ones).

 

Why does that make you nervous, Jones? Because the book was good?

 

Yeah, Mike. It's a little like naming your kid Nelson Mandela. You're kind of dooming him to an unflattering comparison.

I mean, I'm flattered, too, that my editor called it that. O'Brien's original story ran in Esquire, it's our 75th anniversary, it's one of my favorite books.

But still, not good for my neuroses.

 

I forgot to mention in my story about the tennis feature: I didn't finish it until about 3:30 that next morning.

Deadline is a vengeful bitch.

 

I see what you're saying. I read that book in college, and it was a good read.

 

Had a local athlete, three weeks after getting her license, crash because she was DUI. Was ejected and killed. I talked to her coach three times, she broke down every time I called her. Her teammates were so upset they wouldn't talk. Around the same age as my brother. From a good family, great GPA, good athlete, probably scholarship level and nothing as far as discipline problems, decides to try drinking one night and ends up dead because her friends were too stupid not to let her leave the house and she was afraid of not getting home by curfew. Sometimes life just sucks.

 

Though I'm a little late to the party, I'd like to toss out an example.

I made a documentary short almost exactly a year ago, and the process made me alternate between worrying it was going to kill me and wanting it to.

It was my first film, which was nerve-wracking itself. Shooting the thing was a new technical challenge, as was editing it. It was a long, sleepless three months in which I was never really sure if I was doing justice to the subject, or if I was just creating some sort of great cosmic joke.

But to add to the technical stresses, the piece is on organ donation. It's a subject of tremendous importance to me, since my mother died while waiting on a transplant.

I left every interview, every shoot and bawled like a small child. Every hour of footage I collected has a corresponding -- and heartbreaking -- crying jag attached to it. In my car, in the editing bay, in my apartment, walking along the greenbelt...

I can barely watch the thing now. I want so badly to reshoot parts of it, to re-edit it. My life completely revolved around this piece and I feel like it'll never be finished.

So, here's to sailing on, then.

 

Sirs, Madames,

After saying that I'd never had an experience along these lines, I'm going through it right now. Not heartbreak but hassle. I'm doing a piece for a city mag with a ham-handed editor (first and second mistakes) who under deadline crunch is rewriting my copy on the fly and even inserting factual errors into said piece. Worse, it's a story about an agent who represents a high school buddy's kid who is a shit-hot prospect (mistakes three and four). I already bailed out on writing for this mag under its new stewardship once -- I was approached to write a piece, as the editor suggested on "John Tavares as the new Sidney Crosby" which I reassured her would happen (and be about as credible) when someone from their esteemed rag wrote the "friend of the friendless is the new Faulkner" feature. Anyway, it's a time-consuming disaster. I've already had the this-is-how-we-write-for-the-mag speech ... which is doubly rich since I wrote for it and won awards for features when the editor was in grade school. Stories that break you are those when you're writing against an editor.

YD&OHS, etc