More satisfying

‘There’s nothing more satisfying’

By Michael Gartner
The Daily Tribun

I’m told I am talking about The Fun of Writing. But writing isn’t always fun. Sometimes, it’s painful. Sometimes, it’s frustrating. Sometimes, it’s embarrassing. The fun of writing? That, sometimes, is like the fun of a headache. Or the fun of cavities. Or the fun of divorce.

I have been associated, off and on, with USA TODAY, so I tend to make lists and charts and graphs. This morning, let me give you a list. I made it up Thursday night, when I wrote this. I’ll call it, with a bow to Alcoholics Anonymous, the 12-Step Program to Good Writing.

Step No. 1. Report. Words alone aren’t enough. Good writing needs facts. You cannot be a good writer if you are not a good reporter. Writers need something to write about. You need facts and details, quotes and descriptions. Even if you’re writing fiction, you need fact. Think about the mystery novels you read. They all have a good plot, of course, but they have something else, too; they all teach you something. (John) Grisham will teach you about the law, or about the death penalty, or about New Orleans. Elmore Leonard will teach you about Florida or racing. Tom Clancy loads his books with fact. Writing is just the pie crust, facts are the pie. So report, report, report. Then throw away the meaningless, the redundant, the unnecessary. (Don’t do the opposite. Adlai Stevenson said journalists were people who separated the wheat from the chaff — and then printed the chaff.) Keep the good stuff. Then sit down to write. So, first, report.

Step No. 2. Read. You cannot be a good writer if you don’t read. Read great stuff. Read awful stuff. Read classics. Read trash. And think about the writing that you’re reading. Why did he say it that way? Why did she put it this way? Why is that so awful? Why is this so good? Do you want to read some beautiful writing? Read the essays of Dr. Lewis Thomas, read the editorials of Vermont Royster, read the columns and essays of Calvin Trillin. Read Sports Illustrated. Read “Winnie the Pooh.” Read — and reread and reread and reread — anything by E.B. White. Read the page one articles in The Wall Street Journal, the science articles in The New York Times, the sports articles in The Boston Bloge. So, second, read.

Step No. 3. Listen. You cannot be a good writer if you don’t listen. I used to work at NBC News, and there was a wonderful woman there. She was smart and personable and telegenic, and I always thought she was going to be a zillion-dollar star. But she had a fatal flaw. She didn’t listen. She might be interviewing you, and she’d say, “Now tell me, Mr. Gartner, I understand your second rule of good writing is to read. Is that right?” and you’d say, “Yes, but before I get to that, I should tel you that on the way up to the show this afternoon I saw 18 masked men come into the lobby of this building, and they grabbed Tom Brokaw and Bryant Gumbel and have kidnapped them, and they killed four guards as they left the building.” And she’d say, “Yes, and what is your third rule of good writing?” She didn’t listen. And I should add, she is no longer at a network. The good writer must listen for the nuance, the emotion, the detail, the odd fact. The good writer must listen for the great quote — a quote, after all, is just the print version of a sound bite — must listen for the evasive answer, must listen for the heartfelt reply. The good writer must listen so carefully that he, or she, can follow through on a dropped hint, a fumbled answer, a punted reply. So, third, listen.

Step No. 4. Simplify. The single best piece of newspaper advice I ever got in my life I got, fortunately, when I was just 21 years old. I was just out of college, a newly hired copy editor at The Wall Street Journal in New York. I was working nights and late one evening I looked up and this big, gentle man was standing there watching me. When he saw me pause, he introduced himself as Barney Kilgore. Barney Kilgore was the man who invented the modern-day Wall Street Journal. He was a genius. He had been a reporter and editor, but by this time he was president of the company, thought — like all good managers — he spent a lot of time walking around the place. “What are you doing?” he asked me. I explained that I was trying to rewrite a story I’d been given, because it was murky. “Good,” he said, and then he added: “Remember, the easiest thing for the reader to do is quit reading.”

Oh, what wonderful advice to a newspaperman. I pasted it on my typewriter, and I’ve kept it written on my computers and notebooks — and etched in my brain — ever since. “The easiest thing for the reader to do is quite reading.” So you have to keep the reader interested. You must not bore him. You must not confuse him. You must not alienate him. Or her. You must cut the complex to the simple, you must turn the simple into the eloquent. You cannot be lazy, and you cannot be careless. Or you will lose the reader. And if you lose the reader often enough, you will lose your job. So, fourth, simplify.

Step No. 5. Collaborate. You cannot be a good newspaper writer if you don’t have a good working relationship with your editor. Talk about ideas. Talk about structure. Talk about sources. Talk about length. Talk about everything. You cannot have an adversarial relationship with your editor. In the first place, that wastes too much of your energy, thinking constantly of her as a bitch or him as a son of a bitch. In the second place, that deprives you of a great sounding board. In the third place, it gets you lousy play for your stories.

Writing needn’t be a lonely endeavor. Writing by committee is a disaster, of course — they say a camel is a horse designed by committee — but asking for help, for criticism, for ideas is vital. Everyone needs an editor. But just as good lawyers go forum shopping for good judges, good reporters should go forum shopping for good editors. (You know what Lord Keynes said of lawyers and writing: They turn poetry into prose, and prose into jargon.) Look around your newsroom, find an editor you admire and attach yourself to him or her. For a bad editor can turn poetry into prose, can ruin good writing. Once, when I was a young editor on the page one desk at The Journal, my boss wandered over to the fellow at the next desk and tossed back a piece he had been working on for a day or two. “Redo it,” he said. “What’s wrong?” the writer asked. The reply was simple: “You’ve got all the words but none of the music.” Find an editor who can recognize the music, fine tune it, even add it. A good writer must have a good editor. So, fifth, collaborate, Which brings one to…

Step No. 6. Trust. You cannot be a good writer, a good reporter or a good editor if you don’t work in an atmosphere of trust. Let me explain it with another story from my days — it seemed like a lifetime, but it was only five years — at NBC. One afternoon, Tom Brokaw and I were arguing. I can’t remember what it was about, but I remember we were sitting in my office, and we had strong views — strong, and opposing, I think he thought something should be on the air, and I thought it shouldn’t, but maybe it was the other way around. “Look,” I said, “if we do this, we could end up with egg on our face.” “No,” he said, “if we don’t we could end up with egg on our face.” And he added, “And the thing you’ve got to realize is this: it’s your egg, but it’s my face.” And that’s the way it is in newspapers, too — sometimes it’s the editor’s egg, sometimes the reporter’s; sometimes it’s the editor’s face, sometimes the reporter’s. But if you don’t trust one another — respect one another — one of you is going to end up with egg on your face, and it might not be your egg. Trust means honesty and respect, openness and courtesy. You simply cannot work with someone you don’t trust. So, sixth, trust.

Step No. 7. Experiment. There is, in London, a borough called Hackney, and centuries ago it was known for the horses that were bred there. Those horses were rather ordinary horses — they were not used by hunters or soldiers or draymen — and they were used mainly for ordinary riding. These horses became known as hackneys. A Hackney horse was often hired out, so eventually the work hackney came to describe any horse kept for hire. Horses that are hired out are often used for dull, plodding, hard work, and that’s why today we say anything — a phrase, a practice, a style — that’s dull or that has been overworked or that’s worn out by long use or practice is hackneyed.

And that’s why a person, especially a writer, whose assignments are boring or whose writing is stale is called a hack. To complete this little story, I should add that those horses often were used to pull carriages, and eventually those carriages themselves became known as hackneys — which is why some old-timers still refer to taxicabs as hacks and which is why the cab driver on Big Town — and if you remember Big Town and Steve Wilson and the Illustrated Press, you’ll see that I’ve deftly moved this back to newspapering — anyway, that’s why the cab driver on Big Town was called Eddie the Hackie.

Well, it’s one thing to be called a hackie if you’re a cab driver, but it’s quite another to be called a hack if you’re in a newsroom. And the way you keep from being boring or dull or stale is to experiment. Don’t let your writing get in a rut. I realize that this is especially hard at newspapers and magazines that have unbreakable formulas for writing articles and features. But fight the system. Peter Kahn, who now is the president of Dow Jones, was probably the best writer in the history of The Wall Street Journal. (And, as his editor, I should add, “And the worst speller.”) He was always experimenting, always forcing me to break the mold of those page-one stories. He’d go to far-off corners of the world, gather wonderful detail, telling anecdotes, and pithy quotes and then assemble them into something beautiful that looked not at all like the formula page-one stories of then or now. They were just too beautiful to touch, so beautiful and delicate that I feared if I even breathed heavily on just one paragraph the whole arrangement would crumble. So I’d run them as Peter wrote them — except, of course, for the spelling — and the readers were thrilled. Try new techniques, new arrangements, new gimmicks, though that’s a lousy word to use. So, to avoid being a hack, seventh, experiment.

Step No. 8. Talk. Talk to others, but talk to yourself. Chip Scanlan of Poynter once asked me how many times I write a lede for an editorial before I find the right one. Just once, I said. But then I admitted I write 50 in my head, on the 35-mile drive to work in the morning or home in the evening. I compose as I drive, and then I say the ledes out loud, listening for the rhythm and cadence, hunting for the lyric — much the same way, I suspect, a songwriter taps out different notes on his piano in search of just the right tune. Sometimes, I make up whole editorials — 400 or 500 or 600 words — as I drive, and I talk them to myself, often out loud. I work, especially, on the ledes and the endings. For I think the biggest flaw in newspaper writing is a lack of endings.

In television, I constantly heard producers talking about how a story had to have a beginning, a middle and an end. So do newspaper stories — even the briefest, most mundane. A story has to have an end, a closing. The reader can’t feel she has been left hanging. You have to have a graceful way to say, as Porky Pig used to say, “That’s all, folks.” In editorial writing, the ending has to make the point one final time, add the final punctuation. In news stories, it has to be the final ribbon wrapping up the package of information.

Remember how, a while ago — it might seem like hours to you — I said Step No. 3 was “listen.” Well, listen to yourself, too. The good writer develops his own voice. You just can’t do that if you don’t listen to yourself. And the best way to listen to yourself is to read to yourself — out loud. Listen for the cadence — or the discordance. Listen for the beat — and the offbeat. Listen for the rhyme and the reason. Sometimes, you’ll hear the jarring word, the awkward phrase — the word that looked just fine but sounded junky, the phrase that typed nice but sounded clunky. So, eighth, talk.

Step No. 9. Pounce. My partner at the Ames newspaper, the guy I won the paper with, had a little party the other day when I won the Pulitzer Prize. He had the whole staff in, of course, and some townfolk, and he invited my father, a retired newspaperman who turned 95 that very day. Everyone was having a good time, and I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a Des Moines Register reporter talking to my father. They talked for several minutes. The next day, in the Register story, there was one paragraph about my father. After noting that the youngest person at the reception was a 5-year old, the reporter wrote: “The oldest was Gartner’s father, Carl, whose 95th birthday coincided with the announcement that his son had won the most prestigious prize in journalism. ‘I taught him to dangle his first participle,’ Carl Gartner said.”

That was a great quote, and the reporter pounced on it. The good writer knows how to use quotes. He knows to use them as punctuation, as transition, as re-inforcement. He knows to use them as punctuation, as transition, as re-inforcement. He knows never to use them redundantly, long-windedly, or confusingly. The quote, as I said earlier, is just newspaperdom’s sound bite — a device to move the piece along, to get the reader from here to there — by adding a dollop of fact or a dash of amusement. The good writer always uses quotes and always uses them sparingly. But it takes a good ear to get a good quote. So, ninth, pounce.

Step No. 10. Love. You cannot be a good writer if you do not love writing and love reporting. It’s simply impossible. If you do not love what you are doing, quit now and find another job, another line of work. For you’ll never be happy — and you’ll never be good. I have this rule about work. No job is perfect, I believe. Every job has some tasks that are disagreeable or distasteful or dismaying. But on one should stay in a job where more than 20 percent of the duties are unpleasant and unsatisfying. When the bad-part index hits 20, quit. Every job should be at least 80 percent fun. You can’t love a job that’s no fun, and you can’t succeed in a job you don’t love. That’s especially true if the job is writing. To be a good writer, you must absolutely have to love writing — you have to love the meanings and sounds of words, you have to love the rhythms of phrases, the cadence of sentences. You have to love, even, the look of paragraphs as they sit atop one another. You have to love facts, too. You simply cannot be a good newspaper person if you are not curious. I remember, once, when my daughter, w ho now is 26, was in kindergarten, and the teacher called us in. “I’m worried about Missy,” the teacher said. “She seems so immature.” “Well, what the hell,” I responded, “she’s only 5 years old.” My wife, more rational as always, asked the teacher what she meant. “Well,” the teacher said, “she just walks around all the time and asks everyone else what they are doing.”

“I hate to tell you this,” I said to the teacher, “but that’s what I do all day, too.” So, you cannot be a good writer if you do not love facts. You cannot get facts if you are not curious. Therefore, as your logic teacher would tell you, you cannot be a good writer if you are not curious. So, tenth, love.

Step No. 11. Care. You cannot be a good writer — or reporter — if you do not care what you are writing about. You have to have a genuine interest. If you don’t care about education, you cannot write informatively and interestingly and gracefully about it. Simply because you don’t care. I’m not saying you should have an agenda — indeed, if you have an agenda you should not be in the newspaper business. And let me stop here, for a minute, and explain. If you want to change the world, you are in the wrong business. If you want to change the world, become a teacher or a politician or a sociologist or a mom. Do not be a reporter. Let me take a shot or tow, here, across the bow of this goofy thing called civic journalism. Reporters are supposed to explain the community, not convene it. Reporters are supposed to explore the issues, not solve them. Reporters are supposed to expose the wrongdoers, not campaign against them.

End of editorial. And start of anecdote. I have a friend who 40 years ago was a summer intern on the Baltimore News-American, which doesn’t exist any more. Soon after my friend got there, a wise and wizened old city editor called him over, “Son,” he said, “there are two million people in this town, and every one of them has a story to tell.” My friend, a Princeton student, thought he knew what was coming, and he sort of rolled his eyes. But the old editor continued: “And the thing for you to remember, son, is that most of those stories are crappy.” Well, anything can be made interesting, but it’s a whole lot harder to write interestingly about people with boring stories than people with charming ones. So pick your stories carefully, for it’s hard to care about something crappy. And you cannot be a good writer if you do not care about what you are writing about. So, eleventh, care.

Step No. 12. Balance. You can be a good writer and write terribly unfair stories, but you can’t be a good newspaper writer and do that. Not, at least, for a mainstream newspaper. Fairness is vital for every story and every newspaper, for the unfair story hurts the credibility of the reporter and the editor and the newspaper. What this means is that the good writer avoids cheap shots. And I know that is hard to do. Cheap shots are just so much fun. Sometimes, they just roll out of the computer like Fords off an assembly line. They are sharp and snappy and pretty and appealing. But they’re also deadly — for the writer. All I can tell you is what I do — keep writing them, because they’re so much fun to write — but then take them out. I have a drawer full of the greatest cheap shots in Iowa, words and phrases that I savor, that I chuckle over, that I read to my friends. But they’ve never made it to print — well, most never have — because I, or sometimes one of my editors, decided they just weren’t fair. And good newspaper writing, as I said, demands fairness. So, twelfth, balance.

Today, for you to get into the brains of my children — and of me and my father — you must report more thoroughly than ever and write more gracefully than ever. You must report. Read. Listen. Simplify. Collaborate. Trust. Experiment. Talk. Pounce. Care. And balance. It is an enormous challenge — and it can be enormous fun. Who else in the world is paid just to ask questions, to think and to write?

There simply is nothing more satisfying, nothing more fun.