Chapter 104: All Known Thought

My students have finished their stories and they are wonderful. Deeply reported, powerfully told. The editing was relatively easy – relative, that is to the backbreaking lifts required when the writer, sadly, is not at all sure what she or he wants to say.

As I’ve written before, I’m a big believer in overemphasizing the proverbial take-off part of the editing – what might strike some as a disproportionate amount of time devoted to talking out the story, reassessing where it's going, searching for new lines of reporting when older ones run dry. This belief is based on data: a sample size of hundreds of students whom I have kept from writing until they’ve arrived at the moment when they are prepared to, as I tell them, “like you know it.” Because they do. Call it writing with authority. 

My students and I have spent the past week in side-by-side edit sessions. We work from a Google Doc. I read the story aloud and they follow along and when I want to make a change, I tell them what I am thinking and give them the chance to push back. I will listen and sometimes accept their arguments for leaving things alone. Eager as I might be to make a change, I do not want to be like the editor my wife had as a young reporter who made every story sound as if they had written it. The editor was a terrific writer. But the stories were my wife’s, not her’s. 

I remind my students, even as I am cutting and moving things around, that the work at this point is essentially cosmetic: I am editing for clarity, speed, and order, as well as the removal of excess. I assure them that they have done well and no story has ever emerged from an editor’s hands without having some alterations. My brother, Jim, is a master at cutting Hamlet to make it fit into a two-and-a-half hour production. I have to believe that Shakespeare would note the attendance figures and shake his hand. In fact, he reminded me, Shakespeare himself took a scalpel to Hamlet. Too many lines.

But even as I edit, one consistent flaw reveals itself time and again: the tendency toward more. Or rather, to feel the need – actually, needs because the impulses vary – toward including All Known Thought.

The term was a favorite of a former editor of a Very Important Newspaper who believed that it was imperative for the paper to step back, generally on Sundays, and offer readers a big heave on the major story of the week. It is a worthy impulse when your mission is to leave readers fully informed, even if the experience can feel like homework. It is built on inclusion, which is fine when the goal is being comprehensive but not necessarily a good thing when the idea is to tell a story that people cannot step reading until the final word.

I cannot fault my students for coming to journalism school inclined to add when they should subtract: at an early age, after all, they learned that the surest way to please a teacher was to include in their papers Every Single Thing They Learned. The bulkier the content, the higher the grade. Students were wise to the game of school and the most successful learned how to tack a Topic Sentence onto the morass of facts that followed.

Being comprehensive is highly valued when you’re covering breaking news – when readers expect a reporter, as their surrogate, to tell them all they learned in a very short amount of time. 

But when you’re telling a story you are making many decisions – words, combinations of words, structure, order. 

Among the most vital is determining what to leave out.

So how do you know? How do you know what can go, especially if it took pain and effort to get it? How to, in the harsh parlance of the trade, “drown your kittens?” Even I, a cat allergy sufferer, wince at that metaphor.

There are the obvious questions that can begin determining what is expendable: does this detail or fact advance the narrative? Does their appearance high up in the piece gum things up at the very moment when you want to keep distractions to a bare minimum lest the reader experience that briefest moment of confusion and stop, never to start again? Can the story live without them if for space considerations something has to go?

All reasonable and helpful questions. But they do not, I believe, cut to the heart of the matter: it is very hard, and in fact can feel nigh on impossible to know what to cut when you are not completely sure of what you want to say.

In the end, all paths do lead back to the framing. The difference between being, say, 92 percent sure or 100 percent reveals itself when you read through your story and come across something that feels as if it could be cut. Or maybe stay. Or, damn, I am not sure.

The final eight or so percent is the hardest to achieve because it requires a leap of faith from knowledge to belief – the gulf between I know the story and I believe in what I am writing.

So it is that when my students and I go through their stories I remind them that what often separates them from me is not necessarily talent – they are very, very good – but experience. They are writing what are essentially nonfiction short stories often for the first time. I have been doing it for decades, and that means that I have the confidence born of experience to, say, take three strong sentences they’ve written and, based on what I have read and where the story is going, add the one additional thought that lifts the story closer to where I feel they are trying to take it.

I will say: how would this sound? I am not always right, which is why I ask. But it is often the case that merely by adding confidence, belief, to their writing I can bridge the gap between 92 and 100.

The frame eludes us all; trust me, like most every writer I know I dwell far too long in the realm of pretty sure, and will stay there until I run the idea by my wife or someone almost as smart, and be reminded that my framing of the story is not quite where it needs to be.

The result for my students, for myself, and for most of us, is a frame that feels a little too shakily constructed, rather than one forged from tungsten. When we all achieve the latter, choosing what goes becomes a process that takes no time at all, like sorting through a closet, or memorabilia and knowing with seemingly no thought at all what you need and what you don’t.

One of the “tells” that can help you determine whether the frame is as solid as it must be is whether you lapse into what I call “Spielberging.” Yes, as in Steven. Think of all the very, very good Spielberg movies you have seen and how he so deftly and powerfully lands them. And how he then decides to add another ending, a kind of summing up In Case You Didn’t Get The Point.

Think: Schindler’s List.

Think: What an ending.

Think: Why did he need to tack on another?

Why? I do not know the man. But when my students start “spielberging”, when they lapse into something akin to and in summation, I strike the words and am indifferent to their pleas to leave things as is.

You’ve said it. You had it. We’re with you.

It is at that moment when I might be wise to consider changing my admonition from “write like you know it.”

Better to set them forth with: write like you believe in it.

All that follows will be clear, in what stays and, yes, what goes without a tear shed.