Related story: Months down the trail, Kerry officially running

By John E. Mulligan
Journal Staff Writer

This was a hybrid story and, near the end of a long day of writing on the fly, I happened on its hybrid form -- part pyramid, part thumbsucker, part bright.

The main challenges in the writing were: 1) Stick with it, brick-by-brick, while doing the reporting and coping with the distractions of the road and 2) Accept and make the best of a patchwork style that, in the absence of any better idea, seemed to impose itself on me.

This was the first of what figured to be three or four stories on the presidential announcement trip of Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat. It also figured to be the most important -- the reader's first look at the campaign after summer vacation, and the publisher's first return on a big outlay of his money.

It worried me, therefore, to wake up 'way behind the eight ball that first morning in South Carolina. I had not written enough about the '04 campaign and, worse, I had not found time for the spadework -- reading, interviews, keep-it-in stuff for the guts of the story -- that I like to get done in the days before a travel assignment.

It worried me enough to stir me before dawn. But I got a calming jumpstart when I clicked on my e-mail and opened the Kerry budget line I had sent the desk before leaving home. I pasted it into my slug and started the keep-it-in-middle of the story (not counting the quotes, which didn't exist yet).

Then I ran out to get some color for the scene (in front of an old aircraft carrier on Charleston Bay), ate breakfast, and put in calls to pundits before Kerry's event began. Too few calls, as it happened, because my cell phone suddenly refused to dial. But weirdly, it still accepted incoming for a while before pooping out completely. Three cheers for the sources who called back during the next couple of hours, averting calamity.

I find that my enemy on these trip stories is Time's winged chariot. The days seem so frantic and eventful that it's tempting to surf along from one whistle-stop to the next. Tempting but perilous, because suddenly deadline looms and you're left to ransack what turns out to be a notebook full of dust.

For me the safe harbor is write, write, write. Write in the press tent during the speech. Write on the bus. Write and have faith. Eventually, the lead will swim across the mental laptop screen.

When it does, DO NOT FAIL to write it instantly on the actual laptop, or on the napkin in the airplane lunch tray, whichever is handier.

Related point: Flag good quotes and other obvious keepers before they fade into the wallpaper of hours-old scribblings.

Example: This story's tagline leapt out of a chat with Kerry spokesman Chris Lehane sometime during the speech, a good 10 hours before my lead-finder hummed to life.

I know, I know -- Red Sox metaphors are cheap and safe. But I don't care. Snapping the tag into place is a key victory in every fight against deadline. It helps me find my tone and stop floundering. As in: Ah, the fog is breaking; there's a destination I can swim for.

Since my story's style was a puzzle for most of this day, it helped to have some intuition about its content. As sort of a back-to-school primer for the beach-dazed citizen, it had to sketch the state of the Democratic presidential campaign. It had to preview the winter's primary season.

And being nominally a Kerry announcement story, it had to examine the junior senator from Massachusetts -- like, why the hell was he kicking off in Charleston Bay?

Content answers a lot of style questions. Mainly, it fills so much of the allocated space that, soon enough, you have the bulk you need and you can focus on the format points at the top, the tag and the transitions.

After Kerry's speech but before the end of his South Carolina event, I retreated to the air-conditioned bus to cull my policy bullets from Kerry's text. So now (mid-p.m.), I had my civics lesson roughed out; I had my pundit interviews to illustrate the civics; I had some Kerry policy points to leaven the horse-race stuff; I had a tag.

When the plane took off for Des Moines (`Wheels up,'' as they say in the trade) I was feeling much less jittery than I had felt at dawn.

Still no lead, though, and most of the travel time was eaten up by kibitzing, minor news outbreaks and, yes, eating. (Travel tip to self: Food replaces sleep.) It was necessary, for example, to tune in to the candidate-press fencing over a prospective staff shakeup, even though it was unnecessary in the end to write it.

Deadline loomed as we neared the old concert hall where Kerry was to give his evening speech. I was plunging into the last refuge of fretful deadline-writers, the straight news top, when it hit me that a joke against the formula might work. Hence, the ``Stop Dean'' off-lead.

What I liked was that the twist solved several expository problems in one blow. It hinted at why Kerry was doing his ``announcement'' in the first place, it distilled the entire summer's campaign news (``Howard Dean''), and it struck what I humbly thought was a proper note for the piece: Sharp enough to probe, light enough to suggest my favorite thing about politics -- entertainment value.

On the liability side of the ledger, this did necessitate a complete rewrite on deadline, to bring the rest of the story into synch with the flavor of the lead. But that wasn't hard because it was mostly cutting, polishing, and rearranging quotes to support (and balance) the top.

Plus, it was fun.