Story of the year so far?

DD -

Nice post. You can always start a narrative strategies thread over in the Writers' Workshop. Or sticky one here. Or go case by case as the spirit moves.

And let me know if there's any interest in live chats with writers. Happy to try to set some up.

 

Cosmo, those, too, are good points.

And I bring this up most definitely not to tweak you ... this probably isn't the right time to question it, but since we're looking at writing, anyway ...

I'm just curious, from a writer, why this part of your post would be punctuated like this:

Wouldn't the proper way be:

"Isn't that our job sometimes, to make the ordinary interesting using a variety of literary devices at our disposal?"

Otherwise, I think we're dealing with a sentence fragment there on the second part, and that second part IS still part of the question.

(Now, if we want to talk about sentence fragments, and how they're becoming an accepted part of writing "style," oh, I can REALLY go on...)

 

Well, yeah, you're correct shot. I wasn't all that worried about my grammar on that post, obviously.

 

I'm sorry. I know you weren't. Just that I've seen it handled that way other places, and I wondered if maybe I was missing something.

 

Nope, you weren't missing anything. Just me being sloppy and tired.

 

Double - Great take on the narrative writing stuff. I wish there were more textbooks and so forth out there that helped out with that stuff. I guess it's kind of graduate level journalism, so you don't get that deep in an undergraduate J-school, at least we didn't in mine. Too much else to get into in those four years. Saslow's story really pulled me along, despite its length. I wish SI and ESPN ran stories written like that too often - I think they often think, "narrative piece, gotta get the 'Smith Graph' in there!" (they should start calling it that).

Wise's Arenas feature was fabulous and will probably finish top five in APSE, but those two "You must go back to the beginning paragraphs" made me stop and say, "Huh? What?" Perhaps it has less to do with Smith-itis and more to do with writers, when going long, feeling like they have to at least touch on everything early on in the piece, for fear they might otherwise lose the reader.

 

As Double-D notes, Smith gravitates to these larger-meaning stories because that's his thing -- he likes stories he can sink his teeth into. He also writes only a handful a year and is able to devote months at a time to each.

As Cosmo notes, it's all but impossible to do that when you also have to cover a beat on a daily basis.

And I think those are the key point: You have to pick the topic carefully and make sure you have time to do it justice before you try this at home.

Of course, that's assuming you have the talent to write that way in the first place, which not every one of us does. There are horses for courses, and not every sports writer is cut out for long takeouts. When you're not, but you try anyway, you're likely to come up short. Pick your spots, and know your limitations.

 

Whenever I'm guilty of overwriting, it's because I don't feel like the story, on its own, is good enough to carry itself. Either I've made a poor topic choice from the start, or I've failed somewhere along the line in my reporting. So you try to gloss it up with some elaborate story device and lots of wah-wah pedal.

But if a story's worth telling, you probably don't need many tricks to get people to the end of it. Just make sure it hangs nicely, and that the writing is crisp and perhaps a little artful, and that the ending is somehow surprising and yet inevitable-seeming, and you're even money to have done good work.

 

Man, this stuff is EASY!

 

Okay, Pringle, that's pretty damn funny.

No, it's not easy. What I meant was, it's not all that complicated, either. It's telling a story... Like cave painting, only with more adjectives.

 

So easy a caveman can do it!

 

I was just kidding. I really liked the way you explained it - an ending that is surprising while also seeming inevitable.

I think the key virtue in such storytelling is patience. Maybe that comes with age. It takes both a keen "ear" and the confidence and patience that you can get it to that point to do so.