WriterL: The Narrative Writers' Listserv

I read the posts about finding time to write narratives, and carved out a moment in my incredibly busy schedule today to weigh in on the discussion. Like Tom French, I have two kids: Ages 16 and 11. I've been as active in raising them as my wife. Well, almost. I believe that no matter how many great stories I write, no matter how many awards I win, my legacy will be the relationship I have with my daughters.

I've seen too many men and women devote everything to their career only to discover in the end that it didn't mean a damn thing. Part of that was because I covered cops for 10 years, sitting with people who truly were forced to learn the real meaning of life, and what was and what wasn't important. I took those lessons back to the newsroom and my own life. But the newsroom is a seductive place, and it is so easy to have our reality distorted.

I'm convinced that when I retire from the paper in the year 2020 I'll come back a year later and no one will give a damn about me. The people working there will wonder who that old man is wandering around the halls.

I tell you this to give you a bit of my philosophy of life. There's no question that narratives and big projects do pull the writer away from the family. When I was working on the Sam story a couple years ago, I missed my daughter's birthday, my anniversary and sending my daughter off to high school the first day. But when I was covering the police beat, I was pulled away to cover fires and gang shootings.

What I have learned over the years is to be much more efficient as I plan, report and structure the store. I learned that because I had to squeeze narratives out while covering the daily police beat.

I think that's the best way to learn how to do these things. The worst way is to convince your editor that you need six months to work on "projects." A writer like Tom French has shown he's earned that luxury. But for someone who wants to be a Tom French one day, working on "projects" will only lead to disaster because you don't get to write enough to learn the narrative craft. You learn the tools of the craft by applying them to lots of stories.

What I've discovered is that I am good at figuring out what the story is about. I can then think about the structure and what I need to tell the story while I am at home with my family. For me, the most time consuming part of the narrative is thinking about it, figuring it out, mulling it over and living with it. And I can do that while at home, or taking my kids to school or hanging around the emergency room in the middle of the night because someone has an ear infection.

The goal of a narrative writer is not to fill 100 notebooks with information and then produce a seven-part series. It's to be selective.

What is this story about? What one story am I going to tell? How do I best tell that story?

In doing that, the writer makes the best use of the time allowed, to pick the scenes that tell the story and then be there for that scene, but not hanging around forever. I've written narratives on deadline when I was pulling the weekend shift. And I have written narratives that took nearly a year to report and write.

Narrative does not equal big, long time-consuming projects.

Well, those are my thoughts. Now, I have to go home to dinner and then take my daughter to cheerleading practice.

Michelle Hiskey wrote:

But does a great narrative always involve huge amounts of time? Can some of the experienced writers on this list talk about how they have become more efficient about the quantity of time spent with their subjects, how they get the most out of that time and how they decide when to go home?

David Hayes replies:

I don't believe that anything beats time spent with subjects, although often the subjects limit the time they'll spend with writers. There's a distinction, of course, between the time you need to spend with subjects for a relatively detailed 2,000 word newspaper feature, a more heavily detailed 4,000 word magazine feature and a copiously detailed 100,000 word book. Still, I think there's one rule that always applies.

I ask my writing students if they remember that only about one-seventh of an iceberg is in view above the water; six-sevenths remains submerged. When we do research for a detailed narrative, only about one-seventh of our research actually "appears" in the story. But the other six-sevenths informed every sentence of the piece, allowed us to write with authority and confidence.

To use a simplistic example: you're in trouble if you need five good anecdotes in your piece and you gathered six anecdotes. It's quite likely that two or three of them will be repetitive, or not particularly revealing. Better to have a dozen or more to choose from, then select the best five. Same goes for quotes of all kinds and every other kind of data the story needs.

One trick to help determine when enough time is enough is to start writing early, even if it's a very rough draft. That quickly reveals the holes in your research and, just as often, lets you know you have enough of something before you continue wasting time gathering more data.

On the discussion of finding time to write (I'm a stay home dad myself):

I was sitting in the bleachers watching my 9 year old son's softball game a bunch of years ago. Four or five seats down, a youngish guy was bent over a Mac laptop, seemingly oblivious to the game underway. I said something about bringing work home to a nearby friend. He laughed and said the guy in question was a screenwriter. He thought the guy had written "The Mask", a comedy that had done great in the theaters. Apparently, the writer's daughter was playing in the next game. Hunched over a keyboard, sneaking in a few moments of writing time, he looked more like a grad student than published writer.

An inning or so later, one of our big guns hit a home run and ran the bases with all the arrogance of Babe Ruth. As he crossed the plate, he slapped his butt and shouted "Smokin'!", the legendary Jim Carry phrase from the movie, "The Mask". The youngish writer's head snapped up and he smiled. I have no clue if my friend was right about the writer but it was really sweet smile.

Getting the work done isn't a matter of gender or marital status or number of dependents. If you want to do it, you'll find a way. And you don't have to become a lousy spouse or parent. It's normal to look for shortcuts and to put things off, but in the end those are just excuses.

As Tom French noted, it's embarrassing to offer autobiographical details as bona fides, but there doesn't seem to be a way around it in this discussion. I'm married, have two boys aged 12 and 9, and have been a freelance reporter for more than 20 years. My wife is also self-employed. In the early years of parenthood we used babysitters or daycare for 6 hours a day, and we split the rest 50/50, day on, day off, from cooking to pickups to laundry to shopping. We still do. We contribute equally to the household expenses. We both travel for work, about the same amount. We accommodate. (Good, that's out of the way.)

Now I'm working on a book about an inventor and his invention. Because the invention was secret, I couldn't get an advance. But I was convinced there was a good narrative book in it, so with my wife's encouragement, for a year and a half I spent two days a week at the inventor's company, two hours away from here. The rest of the week I did magazine work. I maxed out credit cards, cut expenses, babied my 1990 Honda, went crazy. But I got the material, because I was there, and there again, and still there months later. And that's why I finally got a good advance.

My point is that there's no shortcut for spending time on a narrative story, and if you're married and a parent, that means there's no way to get the story without risking other things like sleep, financial security, comforts, normality. I don't think that's news, I think it's just too hard for most people to do. And I think that's completely understandable but difficult to accept.

My students and I were discussing Tom French's Pulitzer prize-winning "Angels & Demons" in class the other day. We were marveling not only at Tom's incredible capacity for research but also by his uncanny ability to structure that mass of material for best dramatic storytelling impact. We'd very much like to hear Tom -- and others on the list -- talk about how writers organize their material before they sit down at their computers and begin writing.

Lois Baron wrote:

1) Break down a writing project into ALL its parts, and estimate how long each part might take ... compose list of interview questions -- 15-30 minutes; buy new cassette tapes and batteries -- 30 min.; line up babysitter -- 5-30 min; get interview suit dry cleaned; do the interview -- 2 hours; transcribe tape -- 4 hours.).

Cynthia Ramnarace replies:

Okay, forgive me if this is completely off topic, but I'm wondering how many people use tape recorders. I don't. I hate them. I fear them. I dread the thought of spending four hours transcribing notes. But I've been in interviews where I really really wished I had one with me. The person either talks really fast or is completely scattered and if I didn't have to focus so much on taking notes I could listen better.

Does anyone have any note-taking tricks? Any state-of-the-art couldn't-live-without models of recorders that they use? Any tips on using a tape recorder and not having to spend FOUR HOURS transcribing notes? Hey, that's a way of finding/saving time, so it's kind of on-topic.