Deconstructing a story: Gruley shares his secrets

When the Wall Street Journal's Bryan Gruley was asked by the folks at the Poynter Institute to deconstruct one of his stories, there were some obvious choices.

He had just won the American Society of Newspaper Editors deadline news reporting competition for his lead story on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a piece he wrote in less than two hours. He told the complete Sept. 11 story, using e-mail reports from dozens of colleagues, through the eyes of average people in the midst of an extraordinary event.

Gruley, a senior editor in the newspaper's Washington bureau, also had won praise for his ability to craft quirky Page 1 business pieces, like a lengthy story detailing the lives of two day traders who made and lost fortunes buying and selling the stock of a single company.

But Gruley, a guest faculty member at Poynter's writing and editing seminar in October, chose instead a piece that, on the surface, appeared to be nothing more than a he-said, she-said fight between two telecommunications companies.

He got the idea for the story from a brief in a telecommunications trade publication.

• Lesson No. 1 for beat reporters: read trade publications. They are great for finding story ideas, especially the briefs and classified ads.
  
• Lesson No. 2: Things look different when you know what really happened, and why. "Experts" rarely know what really happened, he said. The trade publication brief merely said one telecommunications company had cut off the trunk connection used by a competing company, stopping phone service for a small number of customers. Gruley wanted to know why.
  

It's easy to see stories of conflict as having a good guy and bad guy. But Gruley argues the better stories have gray areas because life is seldom black and white. So he went to find out why the company cut off the connection, and why in the world the two companies were fighting over the town of Regent, N.D., population 268.

Most of the skills Gruley used during his trip are common to veteran reporters: write everything down because you don't know what you'll need; relax interview subjects by talking about yourself; keep asking the question, "So what happened next?" to build a chronology; and spend time talking to the alleged "bad guy," if there is one, to get their story and understand their motives.

For such trips, he buys cheap, one-use cameras and shoots lots of pictures. Pictures, he said, help reporters see things they might not see, and remember details they might have lost on the trip home. (Yes, he expenses the cameras).

When he starts to write, he creates two files. In one, he writes the chronology of events. In the other, he puts what he calls his "stuff," from quotes to details that he might include. The "stuff" file doesn't contain everything from his notebook. It is, instead, his first attempt at self-editing, determining what's important.

Then he puts on his headphones (usually jazz, he loves Thelonious Monk), and writes. A lot. He might write 180 inches on a 45-inch story, before printing the story out and winnowing it down.

He has several rules for narrative writing. At the top of the story, he strives to get the reader's attention and quickly let them know what the story is about and where he's taking them. In the Regent, N.D. story, Gruley did this by putting readers there at the exact moment service was cut off. After the quick anecdote, he uses a paragraph - two sentences - to simply describe how the story of Regent is a universal one in the battle for telecommunications supremacy. "There are only two stories: somebody goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town," he said, quoting an often-repeated line. The universal stranger was the out-of-town telecommunications giant coming in to compete with the hometown company.

Gruley uses quotes sparingly. He particularly doesn't like ending every story with a quote. Stories have a natural ending, he said, and don't always need a quote to sum them up.