7.24.2000
Boiling down a toothsome story to a palatable column size

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By JOHN E. MULLIGAN
Journal Staff Writer
     After almost three years at my part-time Letter from Washington column, I have found a simple, two-part test for filling it. First, the broccoli: I like to serve the reader a nutritious local angle. Then, the dessert: Once a month, I like a treat.
     The method has a stringent effect on the writing. I try out a lot of decent stories, but most of them don't make print, except as Political Scene nuggets or shorts.
     This column was typical, arriving as a sketchy pitch from a long-time source. The story of a spook buster running a new foreign-policy shop at Newport's Salve Regina University obviously passed the broccoli test.
     Plus, it had the makings of a toothsome dessert for yours truly. I didn't know Nuccio, but I knew of his story, having enjoyed Central American battle dispatches since going down there on a junket years ago. The local angle also tickled me because Newport used to be home.
     These predispositions made me think of contrasting the spy tale with the placid backdrop of the school's Bellevue Avenue campus -- home to many a society mansion. They also helped me to hit it off with Nuccio as a source during our first meeting, over lunch.
     I tried to make this date more conversation than interview. It helped me to listen better and to let Nuccio settle the question of how he might figure in a column. He settled it before the crab cakes arrived; he was a natural storyteller.
     Some of my scant notes (mostly on his blue-collar youth, his bearing and looks, the plainness of his speech) wound up in the eventual column without much editing. Moral: First impressions are a powerful tool for writing about people, if I can relax and stay quiet enough to let them work.
     I put the story aside for two or three weeks, then read up on Nuccio's case, then made a story plan:
     - Lead with the old-fashioned device of plunging into the middle of things, with my hero at center stage.
     - Cut that episode short to create suspense.
     - Splash in the local scenery and flash back to his origins in Jersey.
     - Go back and finish the mystery story.
     At this point, I interviewed Nuccio by phone. (For narrow, specific questions, the phone beats talking face-to-face. The phone lends itself better to crisp, all-business exchanges.)
     I tailored my questions to two very specific writing needs.
     Need One: Concrete detail about his part of the story -- dates, names, documents, scenes, etc. I vacuumed up more of this stuff than I would actually use. I wanted to assemble the story from factually complete, fully colored pieces; I did not want to have to scrap some nice vignette because I didn't quite understand it or didn't know what time of year it happened.
     Need Two: If Nuccio was to tell the story, the voice had to be his. I needed his emotions, his choice of the key junctures in the narrative.
     So, for example, I asked: ``Was there a moment when you realized, `Holy mackerel. I'm totally screwed!'?''
     Nuccio's answer permitted me to put the smoking gun in the lead episode, with his great quote about being stabbed with an icicle.
     Having a ton of background detail let me adopt Nuccio's voice without a lot of awkward attribution. Example: ``Not if I can help it, he resolved.'' The interview also snagged me an ironic tag line when Nuccio warned me that he'd be hard to reach because of his upcoming trip to Guatemala.
     First I wrote the lead, then the tag (giving myself a destination toward which to write).
     But two problems persisited as I followed my paint-by-numbers outline.
     1. Nuccio's story was too full of characters and subplots.
     2. Nuccio's role was subtle. He foiled a CIA coverup in a typically oblique Washington way: he told a key senator, who leaked the story.
     My solution was to write and boil down repeatedly, four or five drafts in all. I struggled especially to keep the opening tight enough to run before the jump. Other crowded episodes I reduced to a transitional line and lopped off. In hindsight, the story seems too densely packed to permit the sense of leisurely unfolding that I had wanted. If I had it to do over, I'd remove the second murder and shrink the role of the bad guy.
     Another reminder, all in all, of how tough a job the real columnist has telling the story day in and day out -- simple, short, without a wasted word.



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