Make
Your Story Sing A common conflict in newspapers today is newsholes getting tighter and writers complaining about space limitations on their stories. Without question, some stories lose important substance as they get cut for tighter newsholes. But writers should not assume that space restrictions preclude quality narrative writing. Listen to some of your favorite ballads. Study the storytelling of the songwriters. Use those techniques in your stories. Study the song's narrative structure Follow the story arc. Jack Hart of the Oregonian teaches writers to follow a story arc of exposition-rising action-climax-denouement. Generally speaking, if a reporter gets an interview with the mother of a young man killed in a senseless act of violence, we figure that's going to take a lot of space. Especially if the mother poured her heart out to you and told you how she begged her boy not to carry a gun but couldn't stop him. You think you're going to need 25 inches to tell that story, maybe 35, maybe more. See how this story arc plays out in the 305-word Johnny Cash song, "Don't Take Your Guns to Town": Exposition. The exposition is where you introduce your protagonist and set the scene. "A young cowboy named Billy Joe grew restless on the farm." In the first line of the song, we meet the protagonist and learn about a basic characteristic that will lead to the central conflict of the story and ultimately to his demise. The short story doesn't have room for wasted words. You need to start moving your story along from your first words. The second line gives us more character development ("A boy filled with wanderlust who really meant no harm.") and the action starts in the next line as he's getting ready to go to town: "He changed his clothes and shined his shoes and combed his dark hair down." Protagonist engages the complication. The story shifts from exposition to rising action, Hart says, when the protagonist engages the complication, or the central conflict, of the story. That comes at the end of the first verse and in the chorus, when Billy Joe's mother cries and begs him, "Don't take your guns to town." Rising action. The story unfolds in the next two and a half verses, as Billy Joe laughs and falsely reassures his mother he can shoot "as quick and straight as anybody can." Besides, he says, he wouldn't shoot without a cause, he'd gun nobody down. Even in this short 305-word story, Cash had room for foreshadowing. Billy Joe's cause for trying to shoot someone turns out to be ridicule. But his promise is half-right: He won't gun anyone down. The next verse has Billy Joe riding off, outwardly carefree ("a song upon his lips"). But as he reaches the cattle town and walks into a bar, we see that is a façade. He drinks his first strong liquor "to calm his shaking hand." Climax. Cash showed how you don't need a lot of words to set up the climax of your story. He did it with 11 words: "A dusty cowpoke at his side began to laugh him down." This shows the effective use of archetypes. We needed some description of Billy Joe at the beginning of the story. But we have no description of the mother, just her tears and her plea to Billy Joe, echoing throughout the story. The tears and the plea develop her character sufficiently. We don't need description of her appearance or the background that leads to her fear for her son. The reader/listener understands the worried mother. Similarly, the reader/listener has seen the laughing dusty cowpoke stirring up trouble. Since the character is an archetype, we don't need a full description of his jangling spurs and sinister mustache. We don't need the dialogue of his ridicule, his inflammatory words. The reader/listener pictures the dusty cowpoke, hears the ridicule and feels Billy Joe's anger rising. Then the climax itself takes just a few words. We knew it was coming from the mother's first plea and from Billy Joe's cavalier reassurance. No need to draw it out. "Filled with rage, Billy Joe reached for his gun to draw, but the stranger drew his gun and fired before he even saw." Denouement. This is where you draw your story quickly to a close following the climax. The crowd gathers around the dying youth and wonders at his final words: "Don't take your guns to town, son. Leave your guns at home, Bill. Don't take your guns to town." Conflict/Resolution.
Ken Fuson of the Des Moines Register says every story is basically a story
of conflict and resolution. Cash shows how effectively you can establish
the conflict and resolve it without using a multitude of words. The central
conflict is between Billy Joe and his mother: her begging him not to take
his guns to town, him reassuring her of his manhood. We have a secondary
conflict, too, between Billy Joe and the dusty cowpoke. The conflicts
are resolved together, when the dusty cowpoke outdraws Billy Joe. And
in his final words, Billy Joe admits Mama was right. Setting. In a short story, you don't have as much space to develop each story element thoroughly. Character, plot, conflict and theme are the most important elements of this story and each is fully developed. Setting is less important here, but not neglected. We actually have four settings. One setting ("cattle town") takes only two words to cover. Two take only a word (farm and bar). The fourth setting, the route from farm to cattle town, is only implied. We see Billy Joe riding along, singing, wearing his guns. The reader fills in the mesas and tumbleweeds and sagebrush without a word from the writer. Hearing the notes that aren't played. Playwright David Mamet wrote a thoughtful piece for the New York Times, telling how a piano teacher told his wife not to play certain notes in a musical piece, saying the listener hears them anyway. The same principle, Mamet said, works in writing. The reader hears some of the notes we don't play. The reader fills in the tumbleweeds and the jangling spurs and the dusty cowpoke's cutting words, and they actually gain power by their absence. The reader becomes a more active participant in the story, filling in important details rather than becoming a passive sponge absorbing every scrap we can empty from our notebooks. (You can read Mamet's piece by searching the New York Times on Lexis-Nexis for the words Mamet and Buchalter.) Scenes. The story unfolds in scenes, which don't need to be long and do need to move the story along. This story has three scenes: Billy Joe and his mother at home on the farm, him getting ready to go to town, her begging him to leave the guns at home, him reassuring her; him riding off to and entering the cattle town; him in the bar, first drinking, then confronting the dusty cowpoke, then dying. Action. Short as the song is, it bristles with action. Verbs give your story its sense of action. Check out the verbs in this song: grew, filled, meant, changes, shined, combed, cried, take, leave, laughed, kissed, said, shoot, gun (down), rode, walked, laid, drank, began, laugh, reached, drew, fired, gathered, wondered. Most are powerful words. They are loaded with action, emotion, violence. Every sentence revolves around active verbs. The only passive verbs in the song really give action to adjectival phrases, rather than weakening a sentence: filled with wanderlust, hung at his hips, filled with rage. Repetition.
Of course, a newspaper story can't use a chorus to repeat a theme as frequently
as Cash did in "Don't Take Your Guns to Town." But other forms
of repetition can emphasize points or build momentum. Read Roy Peter Clark's
"Writing Tool #25: Repeat": http://www.poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=71165
Other songs. Listen to some other songs that illustrate the craft of storytelling. "Harper Valley PTA" is a great meeting story. "Stewball" is a sports story. "Kentucky Rain" is a missing-person story. Tom French of the St. Petersburg Times likes to use "Eleanor Rigby" as an example of narrative skills. Compare the characterizations of Eleanor and Father McKenzie with character development in some of your recent stories. Lennon and McCartney take no more than 38 words to develop either character, yet we see them both so clearly. Bruce DeSilva of the Associated Press uses "Love at the Five and Dime," which spans a lifetime in a brief song. So do "Cat's in the Cradle" and "In the Ghetto." Listen to your favorite storytelling songs. Identify the techniques used and try to apply some of those techniques in your next story. Watch commercials. Television commercials are another effective short storytelling form. Instead of flipping channels during commercials, watch some commercials and analyze the storytelling techniques. Adapt to your medium. Of course, newswriting is not the same thing as songwriting. You may need to use some attribution; the songwriter simply narrates. You can't select just the interesting facts and details. You have some important facts that you need to get into the story. Don't use the differences between songwriting and your medium as excuses to keep you from strong storytelling. Use them as challenges that will hone your skill as you overcome them to write the most engaging, memorable stories. Read aloud. No one writes a song without singing it and listening to it to work out the pacing and the rhythm. Similarly, you need to hear your story as you write it and especially when you think you're done. Read the whole story aloud, so you can hear the flow, the pace, the dialogue. Rewrite. Too many reporters feel they need to perfect their lead before they can move on. They never get into the flow of the story because they keep interrupting that flow by looking for the perfect word. The fictional novelist William Forester has great advice for writers in the movie "Finding Forester": "You write the first draft with your heart; you rewrite with your head." Let that first draft flow without trying to make it perfect. Then go back and examine each passage, trimming the excess words and seeking the perfect words to make your story sing. Resources to help make your stories sing:
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