A SERIAL WORKSHOP: Day One
The movement to improve news writing often ignores one of the most important element in the process of making meaning with prose: the editor.
To offset that trend, I offer a serial workshop: five tools for editors, one a day over the next week — my Thanksgiving present to the men and women who have made my stories look good over the last three decades.
Drawn from lessons I’ve learned from writing teachers, editors and writers, these techniques provide ways to help writers learn to take charge of their stories, to help editors and reporters quickly diagnose a story's problems and devise solutions to take it to the next level.
For editors juggling the demands of multiple stories, these methods share the burden of making stories better and increase the likelihood of more effective collaboration.
1. A “Movie Of My Reading”
Writing teacher Peter Elbow (Writing with Power and Writing Without Teachers), says that what writers need is “not advice about what changes to make [or] theories of what is good and bad writing,” but “movies of people’s minds while they read your words.” Inspired by that philosophy, I routinely tell writers that rather than critique their stories I will give them a “movie of my reading.”
Such a reading is a highly subjective but factual commentary that attempts to reproduce the way I processed the story. A typical “movie reading” sounds like this:
“Hmm. What’s this story about? The lead is intriguing. I get a hint of what’s going on, and I’ll keep reading. When I get to the third graf I slow down. I’m confused. I had to go back and read that sentence twice to make sense of it. Okay, I’m back on track, but now I’m beginning to wonder what this story is about.What’s the point here? I’m getting bogged down in this section. Hmm, that’s a funny quote, but who said it? Okay, now I’m completely lost, but I’ll keep plugging away. Page two. Oh, I get it, that’s what it’s about. Gosh, why didn’t you tell me that sooner?”
Although I usually deliver this reading in conversation, you can do it in the margins of a printout or noteface embedded in an electronic version.
This approach is especially useful with reporters who may come to a writing conference thinking the story is done or even if they recognize it has problems have no idea how to solve them. My “movie reading” isn’t a vague critique (“It just doesn’t work for me.”) but instead gives the writer a sense of how one reader absorbed the story. It’s hard to argue with a reader who says he’s confused. You either say, “Tough,” or “Well, I don’t want you to feel that way. How could I clear things up?”
I believe that writers respond favorably to this technique because they recognize that they are hearing the honest response of a reader to a piece of writing. In this context, the reader is never wrong (although I do recall one writer responding to my scribbled note, "I'm confused" with "I don't agree." ) and the writer, if she really cares about communication, must respond to help the reader understand.
Tomorrow's Tool: Two Questions that Drive Revision
For more:
Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power, Oxford University Press, 1998
Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers, Oxford University Press, 1998.
James R. Elkins, a professor of law at West Virginia University, is another Peter Elbow fan. See his page on this topic at http://www.wvu.edu/~lawfac/jelkins/writeshop/movie.html
