Stories from the Beat: Where to start?

 

My first lesson in sports writing came in the interview at SVM in the fall of 2004. I was being hired to cover games mostly, so the lesson was in writing the game story (lovingly called the gamer), and the SVM folks practiced a few simple rules.

• In the first four paragraphs, you need the who (who was playing), the where (where was it), when (you know, Tuesday night, or something), and the why (we’re covering this because…)
• The first numbers to appear in the story should be the final score. I agree with this, although after years of observing article readers, few people keep reading after finding the final score. Therefore, I don’t think game stories should ever be very long, 500 words tops.
• Other rules were more perfunctory – byline style, etc. 

It’s not the perfect system, but it was a good road map for a guy just wading out on the beat. Over time, I adjusted this with the other thing I find to be the most important thing about writing anything – make it interesting right away. Hook’em fast or lose them. Eventually I started writing feature stories and columns for SVM which allowed for even more creativity in my ledes, and that’s where I carved the niche that opened the door for promotion. A lot of that was by the ledes I wrote, often little anecdotes from observations I made while researching the subject and story.

The opening for any piece of writing is vital whether it is a news report, a term paper, a marketing page, or a novel. You get only a few seconds to make a first impression, and if you succeed, they’ll likely keep reading until the very end. In fiction writing, I’m a fan of the line that drops you right into the action. I don’t necessarily want setting or imagery; I want dumped into the story. Use the rest of the sentences to worry about setting, tone, context, etc. If by sentence two, the reader already feels the forward motion of the story, you’ve succeeded.

The opening lines for the stories I’ve linked on this blog previously are a couple of my better attempts:

From Get a Life: “As he lay dying, Bug Boy remember the first spider, the Argiope Aurantia, curled up against the glass of the Ragu jar that his father pulled from the freezer.”

From The Second War: “Private James Amerson was dead.”

The first one is a complex sentence, introducing a character – Bug Boy – and that he is dying. There is something about a spider also being dead. What could this be about? How are Bug Boy and the spider related? Reading this line now, the only thing I’d like to change is “curled up.” Maybe just curled, but there is a better word out there for the posture of the spider that will strengthen that sentence even more.

The second line is simple – a statement, and hopefully, the reader wonders: “How did Private James Amerson die?”

When you pick up your next book, read that first line a time or two, and know that the writer spent more time on that than any other line in the book, even the last one (I’m terrible at last lines).

Here are a couple first lines that I really like from books I’ve read.

From “The Gunslinger” by Stephen King: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”

From “A Prayer for Owen Meany” by John Irving: "I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."

First lines like that, folks, don’t come around every day.