The Power of Words. Getting the story out of the notebook

10/29/97
GERALD CARBONE: Getting the story out of the notebook

       Andre Dubus, a fiction writer, has told me that he never thinks about a story when he's away from his desk for fear that a good idea might strike him when he's powerless to act on it, then refuse to revisit him when he takes pen in hand.
       Non-fiction writers don't have the luxury of thinking about our stories exclusively at our desks; we must think about them constantly, in the field, as we're interviewing the real-life characters who will inhabit them. Therefore to write well, we must be doubly-blessed by the muses -- once in the field, and once at our desks.
       When I first sat down to interview Doug Goodale, the Maine lobsterman who lost his arm in a winch, I decided to let him tell his story once through with few interruptions. Then I'd ask him to tell the confusing parts a second time.
       As he was telling his story he handled a few incoming phone calls, which gave me a chance to stand up, stretch and read the needlepoint on his walls.
       Goodale has the rare gift of being good at being interviewed, a trait he showed when I tried to slow him down for an elaborate description of the mechanizations of his winch.
       "ll take you down the boat later and show you,'' he said, before continuing with his story.
       On the way to the boat I revisited part of his story; at the boat, we went through it all again.
       That night, before supper, I went down to the pier so I could just sit and smell the bait shed, hear the gulls, see the mud flats at low tide.
       After supper, I returned to Goodale's house and heard another complete run-through.
       By the end of the day I had spent 10 hours with him, logging observations about his wife, daughter, house, truck, boat, and banter with fellow lobstermen. And I had heard all parts of the story at least three times.
       I returned to the pier the next morning for interviews with the two lobstermen who were salting bait when Goodale came hollering.
       When I was done with those interviews, I knew that the muses of the field had been good. My notebook was heavy with good stuff.       Now the job was to arrange it in such a way that it told a good story.

       When I sat down to write, I thought about Chip Scanlon, director of writing for the Poynter Institute (and a former Providence Journal-Bulletin writer), and his adage that "the story is not in your notebook, it's in your head.''
       And I thought: Yes Chip, you're right. But right now this story is in my notebook, and I have to get it out.
       I wrote four headings in capital letters: THE HOUSE; THE BOAT; THE SCENE; AT THE PIER.
       Then I went through my notebook, page by page. When I saw something good about scenes from the house -- Goodale frowning at his stump; by-play with his daughter; the broken clock -- I entered it under THE HOUSE.
       In any sea story, the boat is going to have as much character as any person in it, as no two are alike. I still have hard copy of my first printout, and this is what's written under the THE BOAT:
       "an open boat. a friend of a friend had it in the dooryard and wanted it out. patched it; painted it.
       went in the cellar and started kicking around. 2-3 gallons of beautiful enamel. must've been expensive. but it was purple. so that's what it's gonna be.
       bait on port side. always keep a twine knife stuck into the console. always in the same spot so he'd know where it was."
       The words "went in the cellar and started kicking around'' "beautiful enamel'' and "must've been expensive'' are taken verbatim from Goodale. Many sentences in this story are his words with the quotes knocked off. I like to do that when I can. I know when I'm talking to a lobsterman, or a surgeon or a mountain rescuer, that he or she will be more comfortable with the argot, more authentic, then I could ever be. So as much as possible, I let them shape the sentences, even though I use relatively few quotes.
       THE SCENE included scribblings like this:
       "Orange Grunden's; black boots; blue gloves. Get a couple of strings hauled before it breezes up. Just off the can, bell buoy in front of the jetties."

       As you can see, the notes were poured under these headings in rough form. In my notebook I had the story told three and four different times, tellings sandwiched around interviews and observations of other people and places. I needed to take the details of all these separate tellings and lump them together in their proper places.
       It took a few hours to structure the notes this way but it was worth it. Because now that the story was out of the notebook it could take up residence in my head.
       I began writing beneath the heading of THE HOUSE. The story began, "When storms blow into Wells Harbor they carry the sound of the bell buoy through the jetties, across the harbor, all the way to the pier.''
       That HOUSE scene ended with Goodale "sitting in his yellowish easy chair'' looking away from his stump while he said, "There's no bumming about it. I traded an arm for a life. At the time it seemed like a fair swap.''        When I got to THE BOAT all I had to do was reconstitute the fragmented notes there into whole sentences: "Goodale got this boat for free. A friend of a friend had it in his dooryard and wanted it out. Goodale hauled it home on his boat trailer, flipped it over, and patched its fiberglass hull.''
       You can see how I took the fragments "patched it; painted it'' and fleshed them out.

       Then I did the same for THE SCENE and moved onto THE PIER.
       As I was writing THE PIER, I began to feel the groove. It is a fact that when the writing is going well, as it had in THE SCENE, then my temperature goes up, and my face gets red. And now, in THE PIER, I felt that I really had the makings of a story.
       It makes sense to lead with interesting stuff, and I thought THE PIER worked on a number of levels: It brought readers out of their chairs into a bait shed on a pier in Maine; it established that something was wrong. A muse whispered: This is your lead.
       I moved THE PIER above my initial lead, and I liked it. I thought about deleting the scene that had been the lead, but not for long. It seemed to work as kind of a second lead.
       Tim Murphy, the editor of this story, wanted to move the "fair swap'' quote to the end of the pier scene, so it would still anchor the end of scene one. It was a great idea, but it would have required a point-of-view switch. That pier scene is shown through the eyes of Tony Vakalis, and he's seeing Goodale as this babbling, bloody mess. To suddenly have Goodale sit up and say, "I traded an arm for a life'' would have been horribly confusing. There are no inviolate rules in writing, but I've noticed that whenever you change point-of-view you have to stop, end one section, and begin another as deliberately as you shift gears in your truck. If you don't, the gears are going to grind.
       Tim wanted to get to THE SCENE much faster than I originally did. When he told me this, my heart sank. But I had been distributing drafts of this story around the newsroom before Tim ever saw it, and a couple of the best writers here -- Tom Mooney and Mike Stanton -- gently broke the news that they agreed with Tim. So when I sat down with Tim, I was receptive to a quicker cut to the chase. The moral of this is: Show your drafts. You won't jinx the muses, and you might hear some good advice.
       Even after we made those cuts, most of the text in the final draft builds toward the accident scene. In news, we are trained to get right to the main event and then write away from it. In a narrative reconstruction, you can build up to the drama simply by promising the reader that he's going to see something extraordinary; then you deliver on your promise. Readers want to be teased so long as you deliver, you're not too coy, and you hang some signposts along the way. The signposts in this story would be the foreshadowing: the knife stuck in the console; the drum, turning; the ominous statement that the "Barney boat turned against him.''
       The final draft ends with the delivery of lobsters to Herb's Snack Shack. The draft that I sent to Tim included two scenes after the lobster delivery: the ride back to Goodale's house; some goings on at his house. The story ended with Goodale's screen door slamming into his stump as he crossed the threshold, a pain made easier to bear when he heard his baby call, through the darkness of the house, "Hi gaga!''
       Tim felt that those two scenes wound on too long after the accident scene, and I agreed we could cut them. We cut 28 inches from this story, a good 19.8 percent of the total. For non-newspaper types, 28 inches is about four-and-a-half pages of double-spaced type. So for every five pages I wrote, we threw away one.
       I think I'm batting a thousand on writing too much after the natural ending of my stories. The Red Queen gave Alice sage advice on storytelling when she said, "Begin at the beginning, go on until you come to the end, and then stop.'' But it is advice that I seldom follow. I usually begin somewhere before the beginning; write until the beginning identifies itself; and I always run the stop sign at the end. Only then do I stop. And revise.

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