FEBRUARY/MARCH 2005 1

2004 Harvard-Nieman Conference on Narrative

JournalismWhat a gift of a week-end—two and a half days in Cam-bridge, the campus of MIT just eight blocks that way, Boston University a few blocks the other way, Harvard University a couple of miles behind us; rowers sculling on the glinting Charles River below my balcony; and a hotel packed with some of the greatest writers and editors in journalism.

The weather was balmy enough to get out for occasional strolls up Massachusetts Avenue, past the holiday buskers and futon shops and curry

restaurants. But most of my time was spent inside the Hyatt, listen-ing to Tracy Kidder and Daniel Ellsberg and Lou-ise Kiernan and David Finkel and Anne Hull and Seymour Hersh and Norman Mailer and a whole bunch of others talk about how they do the marvelous things that they do with the raw material of journal-ism: information and language.

With six and seven sessions going on at once, it’s impossible for anyone to hear everyone. So “Fold” deployed a crack team of special corre-spondents to contribute to this month’s report. See inside for their dispatches. ✒

“I just try to

capture and

document.”Anne Hull, Washington Post

ABOVE THE FOLD is a monthly newsletter produced for the employees of the Star Tribune. Unless otherwise indicated, its contents are the work of Laurie Hertzel, enterprise editor and writing coach.Copy editing is by wordsmiths Paul Walsh and Nancy Lo. Design is by the stylish Tippi Thole.

ABOVE THE FOLDAN OCCASIONAL NEWSLETTER ON WRITING AND EDITINGStar Tribune

Minneapolis, Minn.Feb./March 2005

Vol. 5, No. 1

IN THIS ISSUE

3 Jacqui Banaszynski: Take apart your stories verb by verb, adjective by adjective, to find the power or flabbiness within.

4 Anne Hull: To create a sense of place in your story, you have to leave the office.ALSO: Writing with humor. Slowing down the in-terview. And parties galore!

REPORT FROM THE FRONT | PART 1

DSad stories about families whose 9/11

horror will never end. The other day Al and Ginger Petrocelli learned that some remains of their son, Mark, had been iden-tified. Again. Which meant that it was time to visit the funeral home. Again. Time to cremate. Again.

Oddball stories about firefighters who are snubbed by other firefighters. Mr. Murphy was so upset that after slamming down the telephone he stood in front of the Skaneateles Volunteer Fire Depart-ment, flared up a cigarette lighter, and set fire to his F.D.N.Y. hat. He was immedi-ately sorry. A fire chief should be setting examples, not fires.

Dan Barry (please do not mistake him for Dave Barry of the Miami Herald) is the “About New York” columnist for the New York Times. He told a crowded room at Nieman that he had no tips for them (“I’m not a tips kind of guy,” he said, which made your humble “Fold” editor feel a little sheepish, given that during her talk she had handed out a sheet with no fewer than 11 tips). But he did share one of his credos: Slow it down.

You don’t get the good stuff, Barry said, without taking your time. Poke around, prod, ask a lot of questions. Chew the fat. Shoot the breeze. Take your time. Slow it down.

That tiger story, for instance, had al-ready been told in a couple of different ways by a couple of different news outlets when Barry decided to go back at it. As a reporter, you go into a story like that thinking there’s bound to be a detail that someone else didn’t get, he said. And he found one: the fact that once they dragged the unconscious tiger into the elevator, the elevator didn’t go down; it went up.

You don’t get that by rushing into an inter-view, firing off a list of questions, and then rushing back to the office. You get that by taking your time.

In another column, Barry told the story of a woman who was trapped on the second floor of a burning house, hold-ing her infant. A stranger below called to her: “Throw me the baby.” Now, it goes against every maternal instinct to throw a baby off a building, even off a building that is burning. But the man kept calling. “Throw me the baby. I will catch it.” And

as the flames licked higher, the woman threw the baby.

Barry invited the stranger out for pizza. He wanted to find out: Who was this guy? And why was he so confident that he could catch a tiny baby tossed by a distraught mother in the mid-dle of a fire in the middle of the night?

Barry and the guy ordered pizza. The guy told the story of the fire, and then Bar-ry slowed it down. Asked other stuff. What were you like in high school? Did you work on the yearbook? Serve on the prom committee? Have some more pizza.

Finally, in dribs and drabs—because who knew this would be important? Weren’t we talking about a fire, and a baby?—the guy told Barry that he’d played a little football in high school. Played in college, too. Actually, played semi-pro. (At this point in Barry’s lec-

ture, a slow smile spread across his face. “Have some more pizza,” he says he told the guy.)

The stranger kept talking. He said, “I have excellent hands.”

Bingo. Just a little detail, but a good one. You get the good stuff, when you slow things down. ✒

Laurie Hertzel, Star Tribune staff writer

Telling stories

2 ABOVE THE FOLD

Dan Barry wanders around New York City, finding stories. And what stories he finds—outrageous sto-

ries about tigers in apartment buildings. The tiger team dragged the animal into the hallway, where it was

fed gas through a tube and lifted onto a gurney...The elevator arrived... Someone pushed the button for the

ground floor. But the elevator went up—to 12. The door opened to reveal a few people waiting to go down.

“Next elevator,” they were told.

Dan Barry

REPORT FROM THE FRONT | DAN BARRY

Show us your narrative

The Nieman Foundation at Harvard University is looking for good newspaper narrative to post on its new Web site. The editors of “The Nieman Narrative Digest” (www.narrativedigest.org) will include a list of links to narrative from papers around the coun-try; forums for discussing various pieces; essays about the craft of narrative, and links to other sites.

To submit a piece of narrative that you wrote—or just one that you admire—send it to: Nell Lake, Editor, Nieman Narrative Digest, Walter Lippmann House, One Francis Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Or e-mail: nell_lake@narrativedigest.org

D

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2005 3

DAction verbs, to be exact. And, as the

hour progressed, we also searched for ad-jectives, transitions, scenes, metaphors and parallel construction. Led by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jacqui Banaszynski, the workshop dubbed “Literary Foren-sics” was a potboiler featuring our own body of work.

Banaszynski, the assistant managing editor/Sunday at the Seattle Times, led several exercises designed to reacquaint reporters with our writing routines.

“We write out of habit, like athletes who rely on muscle memory,” Banaszyn-ski told the crowd of around 60 writers and editors. “We have signature things we do over and over.”

Some of those signature approaches strengthen our work, but others are job security for copy editors who are left to fix them. Often, writers don’t backtrack to ex-amine what’s been changed or why.

It could be too many prepositional phrases that slow down otherwise solid writing. Or it might be that the details writers choose are more quantity than quality. Or that reporters show off their in-terviewing skills by over-quoting; a foible that Banaszynski confessed to doing early in her career.

Busy editors might have a sense of a writer’s habits, but diagnosing them ourselves is more powerfully illuminat-ing. Here’s how Banaszynski suggested that writers who are interested in im-proving can play detective with their own work:

Print out the unedited stories you’ve written in the last month. Grab a high-lighter and head to someplace new (not your desk) so you can see things a little

differently. Pick out one part of speech or good writing. If you choose, you can start simply like we did at the Nieman Confer-ence, and select action verbs.

Read through your copy and high-light all the action verbs you see. When you’re done, do a little inventory and

pay attention to how many action verbs you actually used. Ask your-self if the verbs you used drive action in your sto-ries. Take note of how well they fit – or don’t fit — the tone and voice of the piece.

Each month, pick another part of speech or writ-ing and repeat

the exercise. Do only one each month so you can specifically be aware of it — and your use of it — as you work on new stories.

Consider scouring your work for the following: action verbs, nouns, adjec-tives, adverbs, prepositions, dependent clauses, transitions, quotes, dialogue, metaphor, imagery, scene-setting, tell-ing details, pacing, character develop-ment, foreshadowing, varied sentence length and parallel construction. Ac-cording to Banaszynski, a little bit of literary forensics can help every writer ferret out weaknesses and build a better case for good writing. ✒

Robyn Dochterman, Star Tribune staff writer

Literary forensicsDim, except for the flicker of an overhead projector, the hotel ballroom

was quiet with concentration. But it was not still. Amateur detectives

furrowed their brows. Yellow highlighters flew across printed pages

of evidence. At the Nieman Narrative Conference, the audience was

engaged, focused, committed. We were on a hunt for verbs.

Jacqui Banaszynski

REPORT FROM THE FRONT | JACQUI BANASZYNSKI

In the evenings, the speakers went to parties with lovely food and wine and gorgeous surroundings and Doris Kearns Goodwin in a sparkly red blouse standing in the middle of the room as though she’d been hired to class up the place.

Servers carried trays of hors d’oeuvres—cherry tomatoes and moz-zarella cheese on skewers, which the servers politely indicated should not be set unceremoniously (and unhygeni-cally) back onto the tray, as your bump-kinish “Fold” editor tried to do.

Instead, they should be stuck into the grapefruit half provided for that purpose. (At least your “Fold” editor didn’t try to eat the grapefruit.)

On the bus back to the hotel after the second party, a sprightly Daniel Ellsberg leaped up, pulled a scarf out of his pocket, and began doing magic tricks right there in the aisle, to the delight of Madeleine Blais and Roy Peter Clark and other luminaries sit-ting nearby.

He snapped his wrist and the scarf magically developed a knot in its middle; another snap, and the scarf was unknotted. He pulled a quar-ter out of Roy’s ear (a place where Roy generally does not stash loose change), and he knotted a scarf tightly around Madeleine’s wrist and then, a magic flutter of his fingers, a gentle tug—

People on the bus oooed as the scarf slithered free. ✒

Laurie Hertzel, Star Tribune staff writer

The parties

Used with permission of ellsberg.netDaniel Ellsberg has been wowing people with magic tricks for decades. Here, he does a scarf trick in South Vietnam in 1966.

4 ABOVE THE FOLD

I liked Anne Hull instantly because, de-spite having been nominated for four Pu-litzers, she was nervous about speaking. She admitted that her friend Louise Ki-ernan (Pulitzer winner, Chicago Tribune) was sitting next to her for moral support.

Now a Washington Post reporter, Hull learned her craft at the charmed Poynter Institute-sponsored St. Petersburg Times. Whether writing about Mexican villages or Atlanta Dairy Queens, she is known for her ability to evoke a sense of place. Here are her tips for helping the rest of us do the same.

Go there. Yes, you really have to. “Get away from being a desk person and get into people’s lives,” she urged. “The world they inhabit is another character in the story.”

Use physical details sparingly; choose only those that advance the story. Avoid flabby words like urban and heartland.

Be creative about finding out about a place. Hull goes early to interviews so she can drive around the neighborhood, looking for details. She reads the phone book to see which churches, schools, and industries are in a town. Other ideas: lo-cal radio, public access TV, classified ads, fliers, bulletin boards, libraries, Laun-

dromats, ex-mayors, high school football games, cemeteries.

Don’t discount your emotional re-actions to and physical impressions of a

place. Does it feel sad? Why? How does it smell? What struck you first about this place?

Listen for the vernacular, the dialect of a place. (She wrote a 600-word story set in a New York diner that is almost all dialogue.) For this you’ll need the dreaded tape re-

corder. Don’t paraphrase when you have colorful language. (For a great example she suggests reading Melissa Fay Greene’s “Praying for Sheetrock.”)

Read the poetry and listen to the music of the place you’re covering. It will inspire you.

Always carry a camera to help you remember faces and places.

Lynette Lamb, “Above the Fold” special correspondent

Crafting a sense of place

Anne Hull

Her topic was how to choose the right person in order to make your narrative come alive. In other words, if you’re look-ing for a real human being for your story, find an interesting one. Here are some of her tips for dealing with sources on long narrative stories:

Look for someone who can commu-nicate well. Find a person with self-aware-ness and the ability to reflect, who has a lot to say and who can excite, surprise or anger the reader.

Don’t bother trying to persuade a re-luctant person to cooperate. It’s not worth the effort and will usually end badly.

Be sure to let your subjects know what’s involved in being a source and that you will be asking for the phone numbers of their friends, family members and oth-ers in order to check their story.

Just talk with your source the first time you meet them. Don’t interview them right away. They need to check you out, too.

Ask yourself, Why are they talking with me? Usually it’s because they trust you (bring previous stories you’ve writ-ten to expedite this process), but they also likely have some other motivation for wanting to be in the newspaper. Think about what that motivation could be.

Find reporting situations where you can fade into the background. Find a reg-ularly scheduled activity in your source’s life and accompany him or her to it.

Take breaks from the sources you use in long narrative pieces. You both need some breathing room.

Don’t forget that most people lie, or at least leave something out. Use docu-ments early and often in your reporting and let your sources know that you will be confirming what they say through those documents.

The personal side of our professionAlthough her talk’s title provoked much speculation, Kiernan’s contribution turned out to be more nuts and

bolts than titillating insider scoops. A Chicago Tribune Pulitzer winner who is currently a Nieman fellow, Kier-

nan seemed engaging and down-to-earth as well as an indefatigable reporter.

REPORT FROM THE FRONT | LOUISE KIERNAN

Don’t surprise your sources with the article’s publication. Let them know when it will appear; consider bringing them an early copy yourself. After it runs, call them to gauge their reaction—before they call you.

Never underestimate the impor-

tance of photographs and their potential to offend.

Lynette Lamb, “Above the Fold” special correspon-dent, is the former managing editor of Utne Reader and is managing editor of Carleton Voice magazine.

REPORT FROM THE FRONT | ANNE HULL

FEBRUARY/MARCH 2005 5

II think about him whenever I’m trying

to write something funny for a newspaper. No one expects to see something funny in their morning news. That’s why it’s easier to get someone to laugh over the B section than to laugh from Row B. Reporters are luckier than comics that way.

That was the point, mostly, of a talk given at the Nieman conference by three guys who write for newspapers in Iowa, Washington, D.C. and New York. Funny works in a newspaper because, well, it’s not expected most of the time.

And there are a million reasons to be funny in a newspaper: Humor reveals. It connects people to the story. It makes things seem real and reflects the way we talk and think about the world.

Here’s what else reporters Ken Fuson, Dan Barry and Hank Stuever had to say:

Subtle absurdities are funny. Let peo-ple discover the humor on their own; don’t force it on them. Take this from Barry:

The stolen bag did not contain much in the way of material value. But its sud-den absence greatly distressed the Buddhist monk who had been victimized, and so the police were summoned to the scene of the crime: a Starbucks at the opulent Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

A police officer in a softball jacket sat down to take the statement of the tall man in a brown robe, whose decaffeinated cof-fee, no milk, was turning cold. Routine questions elicited complicated answers. For example, the victim’s name was Vener-able Kassapa, but Venerable is a term of respect, not a first name.

‘’I’m a Buddhist monk,’’ the robed man confided. ‘’In case you’re wondering.’’

‘’I knew,’’ the police officer said gently. ‘’I’ve been around.’’

Balance the joke with respect for the people you’re writing about. It’s usually funnier if the writer includes himself in the joke somehow, rather than ridiculing oth-ers. Still, even if it feels like you’re taking a risk, take it. To leave out humor because you’re concerned about offending some-one is tantamount to leaving out facts. Humor can be a platform upon which we reveal profound truths. This opening to a Barry column gets great play out of a man’s failed dream, but it reminds me that every-one has dreams that don’t work out.

George Mazzey, the grand sheik of Stat-en Island, summons the faithful to his tent three or four times a year. His wife always attends, and his sister, and his brother-in-law. After that, well, put it this way: No need to open a second bag of chips — al-though an 11-year-old grandson may be worthy of membership one day.

Or this, from Stuever, about a woman who sells waterbeds:

Along the nail-saloniest, carpet-ware-housiest, noodle-bowliest, car-stereo-in-stallationiest part of good, old Route 1—the slowest possible route between D.C. and Baltimore, where ambulances scream up constantly along its beaten path of pawnshops and liquor stores and fu-neral homes—the people still understand waterbeds, and Rose Taylor still under-stands the people.

How to be funny? For starters, just try. So many times people will come back from an interview to tell you funny

weird stuff and it never gets in the pa-per. Why is that?

Read Christopher Buckley, Roz Chast, Alessandra Stanley, “The Onion.” Use quotes, because people talk funny. Espe-cially when they’re not even trying. Be a humor writer but don’t tell anyone that you’re a humor writer. It’s a buzzkill to read someone and know that they’re actu-ally trying. Who’d want to have “humor writer” on their business card? That’s like being the “sad writer.”

And by the way, finding humor in something sad is sometimes OK. Here’s what Barry wrote about the notes people leave behind before they jump off of the Empire State Building:

The brooding young magazine re-searcher who pushed off from the ob-servation deck’s concrete wall, calling out, “Well, so long, folks.” The office clerk who scrawled several suicide notes, in-cluding one to an associate that read: “Jack, please call Mrs. T. I’ve gone out the window,” and another to his wife, Mrs. T., explaining that he had ‘’gambled on someone’s say-so and lost.’’

‘’Get your insurance and take good care of it,’’ he wrote. ‘’Get married again by all means, but I certainly hope not. Love, Doll.’’ ✒

Matt McKinney, Star Tribune staff writer

Can I say that in print?I have a friend who makes a living as a stand-up comic. Tough job. His best jokes are the ones that

come out sounding like he’s not even trying. Even though he is, of course, or why else would he

be on stage? He talks about his sobriety sometimes and says he now drinks non-alcoholic beers,

drinks so many of them, in fact, that he’s worried he’s become a Non-Alcoholic. “Let’s get bloated!”

is the punch line.

REPORT FROM THE FRONT | HUMOR IN THE NEWS

COMING NEXT ISSUEMore from Nieman: Kelley Benham, David Finkel and Roberta Baskin.