AWARD WINNERS TRULY COMPOSE THEIR STORIES

Musician theme runs through the discussion of the ASNE Writing Award session; deadline pressure puts some in a groove, others in a panic

"There is an inner ear," said rewriter Martin Merzer of the Miami Herald. "Sometimes you can hear it when you are reading a story quietly, and it is very difficult to explain - but it is musical. It is rhythmic."

That rhythm is key to a good newspaper story, said sports columnist Mitchell Albom of the Detroit Free Press.

"It is a very subtle thing about knowing what to take out and how to get the flow going. ... Sometimes it is just a short little punchy sentence, a repeating kind of riff, and I hear all those things throughout," he said. Quoting Dizzy Gillespie, Albom added: "It took me my whole life to learn what not to play."

The morning session, attended by more than 60 people, let the five winners of the ASNE Writing Awards and a representative from the winning reporting team explain their approach to writing - from sports writing to editorials.

Part of the music of language is in descriptions, something Rick Bragg of the New York Times does well. "Show me, don't tell me" is his mantra.

"I just think I am not really smart enough to write a story that I have to rely on telling anybody what I see. I have to use the images and the details to show."

But when it comes to deadline stories, Bragg "steps out of the way."

"The Oklahoma City bombing, that story was easy to write because I had no time and I went on automatic. ... You really don't have any time to think about it."

Merzer, on the team that won the Jesse Laventhol Prize for deadline reporting, concurred. He said the entry, about a hijacked school bus, put him in a whirlwind of information, people and pressure.

"You have to be a good actor," he said. "If you seem calm, cool and collected, people think you know what you are doing. ... At a certain point, it is just a matter of focus."

And what happens as you get closer to deadline?

"One key is to establish a cut-off point. I want to talk to reporters early to get a feel for the story, to get a feel for what they are going to get, but a few hours before deadline, I try to establish a cut-off point where somebody else takes the feeds because otherwise you are talking to people throughout and you have a problem crafting the story."

As the deadline gets nearer, it's more and more important to focus on the story at hand, said Glenn Frankel of the Washington Post, a Pulitzer Prize winner.

"Deadline is really remorseless. You have to make decisions, and you have to make them immediately, you can't regret those decisions."

Frankel works with Bart Gellman, the Post staffer who won the Laventhol Prize for individual deadline reporting and was unable to attend.

He wrote the Rabin assassination story from his house (with his infant children nearby) as stringers an hour away fed him information by phone. Because he was cool under pressure and organized, Gellman was able to write two great stories.

"He is not there with editors, he is there with triplets, and with the chaos of this event breaking over his head," Frankel said. So Gellman kept it simple: explaining what had happened then explaining the significance of the event.

Then, because he had chosen to stay at home, he got a break: He had interviewed the alleged gunman months before and had the notes in the house. He wrote a short sidebar on the man.

Sometimes, it's not immediate deadline pressure, but the bi-weekly pressure of a column that motivates people. Peter King of the Los Angeles Times knows that firsthand.

"Work expands to the time allowed," he said. "There is a period of false writing where I think I am writing when I have time and I am really, if I was to be honest, doodling."

Deadline pressure is sometimes exactly what is needed to get the writing going, though. The key is to get into a mindset and write. A professor once described it as buckling the seat belt, King said, meaning "OK, now the fun is over, now it is time to write."

But it's still a struggle. He described his bi-weekly column-writing routine:

"You go into it with a feeling of dread and doom and then it gets done and it gets turned in and it gets in the newspaper and there is a reassurance that you get, a glow that I can do this, and that lasts - I have timed it - about three minutes. Then my editor (or if she is not around, I'll do it) asks what's next, and then you start thinking once again of that next column and the dread and the doom comes on."

Good stories are the lyrics of good writing. Stories about people with descriptions of their surroundings and expressions. Stories that bring you in. Stories that have a voice. Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press tells the stories of people in sports, many of whom have no voice.

"When you live in a town like I do, you can use sports as a way to bring some of these stories to people who might otherwise dismiss them as 'Well, that's where they live and we don't live there.' because they can relate to the football part or they can relate to the baseball part."

"I always saw sports as something that was a lot more universal than sometimes is taken in sports sections today," he said. "Pretty much everybody in this room played sports at some point or another, perhaps not well, but they played."

And he gets upset when his column is taken to the front page.

"I have arguments sometimes with the people when they want to put my column on 1-A because I say it won't get read as well.

"And I'm not really kidding."

Branson is Publications Director for ASNE.