Writerland, Chapter 15: The Singular Power of the One Word Headline

Writerland is a newsletter from The Delacorte Review whose mission is to help writers tell the stories they need to tell.

When it first appeared forty years ago, what most struck me about Roger Angell’s classic New Yorker profile of the great St. Louis Cardinals’ pitcher, Bob Gibson, was not its considerable length, nor the enviable ease with which Angell told the story. Those qualities were striking. But what stood out was a single word, the headline: Distance.

I could not recall ever seeing that done before: a statement of belief that one word could capture the essence of the piece and no more were needed.

That headline stuck in the mind. It told you how to read the story, through the extended opening recreating Gibson’s record-setting strike-out performance in the 1968 World Series, through the recollections of teammates about the sort of person Gibson was, through Angell’s visit to the Omaha home of the now-retired Gibson and the Hall of Famer’s candid assessment of his career and life.

The New Yorker recently re-issued the story and it was wonderful to read again and be reminded of the telling details that had stayed with me since 1980: Gibson’s hating All-Star games because he did not want to fraternize with players he’d later have to face; his penchant for throwing at a batter’s “coconut,” or head; how Gibson had his swimming pool painted black, an unwise choice for summers in Nebraska.

I had not read the piece in decades and so this time paid particular attention to the way the headline shaped the reading. I was conscious of how often the word “distance” actually appeared: just a handful. I was conscious as well of how often Angell felt the need to refer back to the headline, to remind us of the theme it established: occasionally but not often. He didn’t need to because, with the headline, he already had.

That headline changed me as a writer. Its purposeful and remarkable simplicity was a challenge: could I be that bold? I wasn’t sure. But there was no escaping the lesson: if I wanted to succeed, if I wanted to write like Roger Angell, I had to be willing to commit to an idea, a theme, one that could be distilled in very few words. Ideally, one. I was not ready to do that in 1980. I would not be ready for years.

About twenty years ago, as I was about to start work on the book about Brooklyn and the Dodgers in the summer of their last pennant race together I experienced the kind of panic that can sometimes result in good things, given that panic can focus the mind. I had grown up in Brooklyn, but too late to have experienced the Dodgers and convinced that had they not left for Los Angeles everything in my world and life would have been better.

This was my story, my book. I had a publisher, an editor, a contract. I had time; winter break was beginning. By this point I had written a proposal that had required a good deal of research and writing. I could not have been more ready. I went to my office, set to dive in. And at that moment understood with a dispiriting jolt that I had absolutely no idea where to begin.

So I procrastinated. I’d been at this long enough to know a thing or two about stalling, and knew that I had to make it seem like something I really, really needed to do. It was a cold day and we had an old car whose battery was always dying. I needed to start the car. Right now.

I grabbed my coat and hurried outside, my agonizing racing along with me. Damn if it wouldn’t stop asking me, over and over and over again, the same question: what do I want to know?

I can still recall crossing the street and the moment when it felt as if a lightbulb went off in my head. It was so obvious and so clear and why in heavens name hadn’t I seen it before:

Q-What did I want to know?

A-What did I miss?

Simple as that. Took me months to get there.

And here’s the thing: it almost always does.

If you are reading this as a way to procrastinate please don’t feel bad: I can assure you that this is will be service of career development. Because I’d like to propose an experiment.

If you have a story in the works, perhaps one that is vexing you – and what story doesn’t? – try this: write down the one word that captures the essence of your story. I don’t mean this literally: if you are writing, say, about the private sanitation industry don’t go with something as obvious as trash.

Think instead of something transcendent, a word that can, in the snap of a finger, say it all.

Example -- Bob Gibson: Menacing. Remote. Frightening. Proud. Prickly. Intimidating. Funny. Scary.

Distance.

Yes, Distance.

I am not suggesting that all stories are best served by one-word headlines, but writers are. If I had to choose one to anchor me in my Brooklyn book it would likely have been the operative word in the four-word reply to my question: missed.

Writing ambitiously often means getting lost in the dark. I know successful writers who avoid such uncertainty, preferring instead to play it safer, to follow the familiar path. But I have come to believe that a greater reward awaits those willing to take the creative risk that is accompanied by a willingness to wander, to search, and to experience doubt. It is in that struggle that connections get made, insights appear. And sparks fly.

But like any journey in the darkness you need a beacon, and a one-word headline can be just that. Its incandescence can remind you, in an instant, what your journey is about, why you embarked on it, and what you’re hoping to find.

Roger Angell accomplished about a thousand wonderful things in Distance and his baseball writing, yet it never read as if he were breaking a sweat. His stories became as much a part of the rituals of the game as the contests themselves. They appeared in the spring and again after the World Series, as the days were getting shorter and grayer and the season felt long ago.

Long before he became editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, who began his career as a sports writer at TheWashington Post, was a fan of Angell’s, as was most everyone who ever covered, or for that matter, attended a game.

“I met Roger when I set out to do a feature about him as an intern at the Post,” he wrote. “That was precisely forty years ago. He was then, a child of sixty, not long after he wrote his masterful Profile called "Distance." What's astonishing is not that Roger is turning 100 in September. No, that is a happy accident of good genes and the health lottery that we all buy a number for and wait.

“What's astonishing is that the best baseball writer who has ever toted a notebook also happens to be a brilliant personal essayist (read "This Old Man"!), one of the most important fiction editors of the twentieth century, and a master of the forgotten art of light verse. That he also happened to dedicate all of his literary energies to the magazine that I work at is yet another happy accident. Lucky Roger. Lucky me. Lucky all of us."

Lucky too, for all those many words, and one in particular.

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We wanted to share with you our latest story “When the Iron Men Returned,” by Andrew McCormick -- the story of a French town that has been celebrating the American GIs who liberated them from the Nazis. Those surviving liberators are now in their 90s and most of those who turn out to greet them were not alive on the day of their liberation.

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