School daze

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The second assignment uses quotes from the text book. We were to explain why these quotes spoke to us. The text is Inside Reporting by Tom Harrower. It’s a VERY different text book, set up more like a web site on a written page. Mixed reviews on that. But it’s been very helpful to me.

Here are the quotes:

Don’t turn in a story you wouldn’t read. And when they tell you newspapers are a business, believe them.
Ken Fuson, The Des Moines Register

Don’t commit yourself to one single technology. It will change.
Andrew DeVigal, The New York Times

Read voraciously. Find the best reporters and read every word they write. Try to figure out how they do what they do, and then incorporate what you want into your own style. Another piece of advice: Take a typing class. I’m not even sure if they offer
them anymore, but I’ve always been jealous of the reporters whose fingers absolutely fly on deadline.
Bret Bell, Savannah Morning News

Don’t lean on “quotes.” Focus too much on finding them during reporting and you’ll miss more telling details. Good quotes are rare. You can tell the story better than the characters in it. So after writing, go back and take out half the quotes. And don’t quote me on this.
Bob Batz, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

and the assignment as turned in:

James Rising
Discussion Assignment #5
Tuesday/Thursday

Ken Fuson
One of my editors told me the other day that the story I had written was “interesting.” I don’t know exactly why, but that really caught my attention. I guess that I had in some way forgotten that the eventual reader must enjoy reading what I wrote. It’s easy to get immersed in the mechanics of building a story and not so easy to remember that I am telling a story. For me the lesson is to stand back when I am done with writing, and read with the eyes of the target audience. Easier said than done.

Andrew DeVigal
Technology moves so blindly fast now that it’s impossible to keep up. I teach media technology. I work at keeping up with it, by reading blogs, columns and subscribing to RSS feeds about developing technology and still I find myself falling behind. A good example: The web pages I edit in the last two years have changed the way we add video three times. The first two incarnations were miserably labor intensive, taking a great deal of manipulation and editing to get the players to fit in the pages or even to work. Now it’s a line of code, cut and pasted. Technology reminds me of the old saw: “Lead, follow, or get out the way.” Nowadays you can easily get run over.

Bret Bell
Stephen King said it in his book “On writing” – “If you want to be a writer,” says King, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
Of those two pieces of advice I think the best is to read a lot. I am rarely without a book. I eat while reading. I exercise on the treadmill reading. I read myself to sleep every night. I read anything and everything and have always done so. I have found lately that I learn more from reading really bad writing (romance novels are good for this) than I do from something that is well written. Truly good writing tends to be invisible. Bad writing sticks out.

Bob Patz
A very wise and learned professor once looked over a story I had written. I had worked and slaved over an interview. I even went so far as to transcribe every single word of the interview, to make it easy to insert quotes into my story. I presented the finished product to my professor and he looked at it, looked at me and said, “This is not writing, it’s typing.”
What he showed me will stick with me for the rest of my writing career. Just putting quotes into a story for the sake of it is wrong. A quote should be used to tell some aspect of the story better than the writer could. A quote should reveal an aspect of the subject, advance the story and make the reader more familiar with the person being interviewed. Not just fill space with typing. A good lesson and one I think I have learned.