Champagne glass

We can explain some things better by treating them twice, once descriptively and then chronologically. The “champagne glass” form has the traditional beginning, telling the readers what the story’s about and why it’s important, and the traditional ending giving a sense of closure.

The middle has two sections divided by a clear transition. The first section treats the subject descriptively and analytically, and then transitions to a second section retelling the story in narrative chronological form. This form works best to straighten out a complex series of events, such as a long budget process, perfecting an invention, controversial election results, or a complicated rescue.

Here’s my favorite, from the St. Petersburg Times. (By the way, a manatee is a marine mammal resembling a walrus, about ten feet long and weighing 1000 pounds as an adult. It must surface to breathe at least every 20 minutes.)

FIREFIGHTERS RESCUE MANATEE FROM CRAB TRAP ROPE

SAFETY HARBOR – Struggling to free itself from a crab trap rope wrapped around its neck and body, a young manatee was rescued by two city firefighters.
The men worked nearly an hour to calm the 10-foot-long mammal before freeing it Thursday.
“With anything that big and powerful, you could get hurt if you got in its way,” said Safety Harbor Fire Capt. Max Shimer, who estimated the animal’s weight at 600 pounds. Shimer and firefighter-paramedic Ray Duke freed the manatee.
“We knew they are gentle creatures and wouldn’t hurt us on purpose. But we didn’t know if this one was injured or how it would react to us. We just played it by ear,” Shimer said.
The rescue operation began shortly after 8 a.m. when the struggling manatee was spotted by Bill Pleso, the city building maintenance foreman. He was making his daily inspection of the municipal pier when he saw the animal about 150 yards north of the pier.
“I could see he was tangled in a crab trap,” Pleso said later. “He was dragging two buoys with him.”
Pleso, who said he regularly sees manatees around the pier, radioed City Hall for help. The Florida Marine Patrol was called, as were the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission and Sea World. The two agencies and Sea World are involved in the state’s mammal rescue and rehabilitation program.
Fire Chief Jay Stout said his men agreed to attempt the rescue when he learned it would be several hours before the Sea World team would arrive. Since no one knew if the mammal was injured, Stout said he felt the rush was necessary.
Shimer and Duke got into a boat and paddled up to the manatee. “It was frightened at first, but gradually it seemed to sense we weren’t going to hurt it,” said Shimer. It did not appear injured.
For nearly an hour, the men reached out to calm the manatee each time it surfaced to breathe. Finally, Duke reached into the water, held the rope as close to the animal’s neck as he could and cut through the rope with a pocket knife.

When the rope fell away and the manatee was free, “about five other manatees, all much larger, suddenly appeared out of nowhere,” Shimer said. “They came up to the surface and rubbed faces and noses. It was a pretty neat experience.”

The lead tells us what the story is about: “a young manatee was rescued by two city firefighters,” followed by details of the creature’s plight and the rescue. Halfway through, the story gets retold in chronological order: “The rescue operation began shortly after 8 a.m….”

And the story ends with Shimer’s terrific quote. In traditional inverted-pyramid thinking, that quote is too good to come at the end; an editor might move it up, weakening its power in the most emphatic position, the end.

Champagne glass pieces are inherently long, and they’re hard to cut. You would choose this form because the second, chronological telling helps the reader understand complex events.

[Had any adventures with this form? Let’s hear them.]

Crossing boundaries

Human beings make decisions at boundaries in their lives. Patients dying in hospitals tend to die in the first hours of New Year’s Day, or of their birthday. Readers decide whether to keep reading just before boundaries, and they remember what they read on each side. Writers need to frame boundaries so readers read across them, and remember important points.

Where are the boundaries? Between the lead and the first section, between sections, and between the final section and the ending. The material on each side of a boundary is either an ending of a unit, or the beginning of another, and therefore emphatic.

We lure readers across boundaries by clarity, gold coins, cliffhangers, and subheads. Unconsciously, readers are always thinking about stopping, and they jump out when they start to feel stupid or confused, or know enough. If your readers think, “How’d I get here” or “Where’s this going,” they’re about to wave goodbye. As they realize they’re approaching a boundary, their urge to leave increases. So you need to write even clearer just above a boundary, such as a section break.

We can place a “gold coin” just as the readers start to wobble. A gold coin is something that will amuse or delight them, such as a neat quote, clever sentence, interesting character, or amusing anecdote. As readers enjoy the gold coin, they predict there are more to come, and keep reading across the boundary.

You’re familiar with cliffhangers from movies, a suspenseful moment originally used to join together parts of a serial. If one episode ends with the heroine tied to a railroad track with a train whistle in the distance, you’ll come back next week to see if she survives. (Of course, we know she will, but we wonder how.)

You write a cliffhanger just before the boundary. Here’s one: “Outnumbered two to one, the defenders of Midway wondered if anybody would survive the Japanese assault.” Here’s another: “Once you have a vaccine against swine flu, you have to ask who will get the shots and who might die.” One more (these are fun to write): “I grin in triumph as I peel the paper collar from my chocolate soufflé. I mean, we’re talking James Beard Award tonight.”

Subheads act like headlines, intriguing readers to read further. They’re shorter and harder to write, and need to point forward. Here’s one to get you to read my final section:

MAKING THE JUMP
One other boundary is harder to control, the “turn” or “jump” in a newspaper or magazine to the next page, because the writer has almost no control over where it will fall. David Finkel, formerly a feature writer with the St. Petersburg Times, used to sit beside the copyeditors as they laid out his stories so he could rephrase the passage just before the jump. You can write a cliffhanger, for instance, and ask the copy desk, if possible, to place it strategically.

Remember that all these devices sit in emphatic positions. Make sure you want to emphasize what you put there.

Emphasis by position

In any unit of writing (sentence, paragraph, section, whole piece), different positions have differing degrees of emphasis, or memorability. Readers remember what you put in emphatic positions. We call this scheme “2-no-1” because whatever comes last has most power, whatever comes first has next most power, and anything in the middle has no power by emphasis.

Consider these examples:

“My wife Joan finds me adorable,” Don said.
“My wife Joan,” Don said, “finds me adorable.”

By moving the attribution (“Don said”) from the final (most emphatic) position to the middle (non-emphatic) position, we emphasize the word “adorable.” (Maybe Joan wrote that second sentence and put Don in his place, in the unremembered middle.)

We can also de-emphasize something, even hide it, by burying it in the middle of a paragraph:

The candidate wanted voters to see him as a populist friend of the working man. But he voted 17 times against measures to raise the minimum wage. His stump speech always concluded, “Vote for me, vote for yourself, vote for Joe Sixpack.”

Or we can emphasize his voting record by putting it at the end:

The candidate wanted voters to see him as a populist friend of the working man. His stump speech always concluded: “Vote for me, vote for yourself, vote for Joe Sixpack.” But on measures to raise the minimum wage, 17 times he voted no.

In this second version, we used the emphatic end of the paragraph to highlight the candidate’s actual voting record, and we changed the end of the final sentence to close with “no.” Double emphasis, double hit.

Traditionally journalists put the attribution at the end of the lead, like this: “The Bush administration tried to legitimize torture by defining it out of existence, according to a report released by the Justice Department Thursday.” Newspapers try to sound objective and neutral, and sentences like that help them. The key phrase “legitimize torture” disappears in the middle, and the most emphatic position, the end, contains the least important piece of information, the attribution.

The 2-no-1 template also applies to sections. Readers can remember what a whole section said better if they have a sense of framing: a memorable beginning of the first paragraph, and a memorable ending of the last one. (Yes, there’s a contradiction here.) Like this:

Jacques Pepin’s newest Cooking Techniques video teaches expert knifework and then applies it to prepping vegetables. [Several paragraphs]
Add this video to your collection. Your vegetables will thank you, and you’ll still have all ten fingers.

Stories have a beginning, middle, and end; memorable stories have a strong beginning and a strong ending, often echoing each other. Whatever you lead with, and whatever you end with will stick in the readers’ heads. So you choose what you want them to remember and place it in memorable positions

Suppose you’re writing a piece with lots of people’s opinions in it. You give all of them fair amounts of space, but you’d really like to endorse one of them without saying so. Let that person speak last, and readers will remember most what she said.

Here’s a problem. If you want readers to remember what you end with, you have to write the whole piece so compellingly that they read all the way to the end. I’ll talk about how to achieve that in a later blog, on “gold coins.”

[“Gold coins” sits at the end of a sentence, the end of a paragraph, the end of a section, and the end of this post. How emphatic can you get?]

Stack of blocks

What form would you write in for maximum power and understanding? 2500 years of rhetorical studies and research suggest the following characteristics:

· A beginning, middle, and end.
· The beginning predicts the middle in form and content
· The middle contains the information, divided into sections by subjects, in logical order.
· The ending gives a sense of closure.
· The sooner readers know what the piece is about and why they should read it, the more they will understand.

We call this form the “stack of blocks” because the middle consists of a sequence of subject-related sections, framed by a beginning and an ending. One section follows another based on the readers’ information needs; if they need Part 1 to understand Part 2, then Part 1 comes first. How many sections can you have? Not many, preferably no more than seven, and better three.

How do you design a stack of blocks? You clump material on similar subjects into sections, and then stack them in logical order.

Here’s a short stack with only one block, framed by a lead and an ending:

With Halloween rapidly approaching, the question arises: What wine goes with candy? Food writer Kara Newman suggests in Wine Enthusiast online that, like pairing desserts with wine, you should match wine to flavors, “such as chocolate and caramel, fruit and spice, custard and vanilla – that you’re as likely to find in your trick-or-treat bag as on any fussy restaurant menu.”

She recommends Port to pair with chocolate, “but pour anything in the red wine family, such as banyuls (a sweet red wine from France) or shiraz alongside handfuls of M&Ms, pint-sized candy bars or other chocolate Halloween treats. Baby Ruth, Snickers or other nutty candy bars in your bag? Select a sherry or Madeira to complement rich nut flavors.”

(Last year a neighbor who accompanied his kids was standing in the background holding an empty wine glass, which I filled with some cab. That’s my idea of adult trick-or-treating.)

[How do you organize sectioned pieces?]

Stopping finally

When is a piece finished? Never. One advantage of writing over speech is that it can be revised forever, even after it’s published. The harder question is when do you stop Revising? When and how do you let your baby go?

My friend Greta Tilley could never stop changing and changing and changing. Her editor at the Greensboro Daily News & Record finally devised a way to get her to turn in her feature stories. He would lean over her shoulder in the newsroom as she typed away at 3 a.m. and say, “Greta, hit the Save key.” Then he would unplug her terminal.

You’re close to finished when you’ve done the techniques I described in my post on “Submitting perfect copy: Use the spelling and grammar and usage checkers, (trusting none of them), read aloud, check names and numbers and facts, etc.

Adair Lara says you’re finished “when you catch yourself changing stuff and then changing it back.” I would modify that to say “when you keep changing stuff and then changing it back.” You can use the clipboard to hold alternative versions of short passages, and choose by reading aloud.

Two questions can stretch out revision endlessly: “How can I make this perfect?” and “Can I make this better?” No writing is ever perfect, just as no person (especially a writer) is even close to perfect. Striving for absolute perfection leads to slowness at best, and never publishing at worst.

Anything can be made better, but the improvement may not be worth the individual effort. You’re more likely to make useful changes in response to the questions and suggestions of your helpful editor. But editors can’t edit what you hang on to.

One good test has to do with voice. Read the whole piece aloud and mark anything that doesn’t sound like you. Change those passages until you hear your own voice flowing.

Here’s a test using the magic questions, “What works, and what needs work?” The key word is “needs,” and the target is the reader. The real question is “What do I need to do to this so readers will understand it and read it to the end?” And you want to add: “and make them want to read me a whole lot more?” Watch out. You’re about to start thinking about yourself, and your Internal Critic is about to sneer, “What if this book isn’t as successful as the first one?” And your finger will freeze above the Send key.

Sometimes, you just surrender it. After 24 years, E. V. K. Dobbie finished a six-volume edition, saying, “No doubt this volume would be a better book if I had spent a year or two more on it, but as [his collaborator] used to tell me, one must always leave something for the reviewers to say.”

[How do you stop yourself?]