Related: Loyalty to the Red Sox is the tie that binds generations

       One Father's Day I fried a dairy-free omelet for my dad. The main ingredients in dairy-free omelets are soy milk and nutritional yeast. I like them; to me, they taste a lot like what I remember an egg-and-cheese omelet tasting like back before I swore off eggs because of the way battery hens are raised. (Ask me about Co-Hen Egg Farms when you have time, a lot of time.)

     My dad chewed through his omelet, finished, set down his fork.

     ``How was it?'' I asked,

     ``Well, it was different,'' he said.

      True to his nature, he was being kind. He liked that I had cooked him a breakfast for Father's Day, but that omelet just about made him gag. I feel the same ambivalence about my ``prize-winning'' essay, ``Loyalty to the Red Sox is the tie that binds generations.''

      This essay is an omelet that just never gelled. I had a day and a half to report and write it, so I began writing it before I was through reporting it. Sometimes newspaper writers have to work this way, writing what we've got while we're searching for more. When I work this way, I frequently fall into the same trap: I structure the story in a chronology that reflects the order in which I learned information, rather than structuring it in the way that best conveys the story.

      For example, in this story my first step was to fire off phone calls to various famous writers all over New England. Not surprisingly, these were neither answered nor returned.

      Step two was: drive to Boston to look at a statue. The statue had to talk to me; it could go nowhere else. So the first information I logged on my notepad was information and observation of this statue.

      True to form, the first scene in my essay is the scene of the statue, ``Quest Eternal,'' mooning the viewer.

      Back in the office I determined that none of these famous writers was going to call me back; the story segues from the statue to being stiffed by a bunch of famous writers. Then Doris Kearns Goodwin answered my call, and she pops up next in the story.

      I interviewed a half-dozen people for this story, the last one being my father. As it turned out, my father gave me the best stuff. I almost always begin my stories with my best stuff, but I was stuck in this rut of placing information in the order that I got it, so my dad's stuff came last.

      In hindsight, I should have taken a deep breath, assessed all of my information -- and then led with my best stuff. Had I done that, I would have begun with my father's interview, in which he shows how baseball defined his relationship with his father. Had I explored that a little more, I would have seen that it also defined his relationship with his youngest son. I'm not sure how the story would have unfolded from there, but I'm certain it would have been a better piece.

      Another benefit of assessing your information before committing to a structure is that it buys you time to develop a consistent tone. My tone in this story ranged from wry humor (the mooning statue; the Red sox fan as Charlie Brown) to sentiment (my father talking about the fields of his youth; Doris Kearns Goodwin linking baseball with ''the textures of childhood''). It's like cooking with conflicting spices.

      I believe that by the end of my reporting I had in hand the information to write a good story. I blew it by panicking, finding a false rut, and riding it into a ditch. Structure is important, and I made no time to think about it. Next time, when I'm done reporting, I'll scan through whatever wreck I've written and ask: what is my best stuff? Then I'll stick that on the top and see how that changes things. That's the best part about nonfiction writing, the thrill of discovering the right structure for a story. A fiction writer can be thrilled by the surprising actions of his characters; we discover those surprises in the interview phase, not in the writing. For me, the thrill of nonfiction writing comes with the discovery of how best to stack a story so that it tells itself in the best way possible. I didn't solve it this time, but I will say this: It was different.

Previous editions | About The Providence Journal's Writing Program | E-mail us | Order How I Wrote the Story | Writing-related Web links
Back to main

Copyright © 1999 The Providence Journal Company
Produced by www.projo.com