Author: chipswritinglessons_harnwk

“The Young Who Died Delivered Us”

Esssays
Kent Rebman/unsplash

When a friend asked us to find World War II grave in France, we didn’t understand it would send us on a pilgrimage through America’s and Europe’s past

The Mercedes taxi sped along the country highway. For the tenth time since we left Paris that June morning, I looked at the piece of paper in my hand.

U.S. Military Cemetery.

Marigny, France

9 miles west of St. Lo.

Pfc. John Juba Jr. Inf. 4 Div.

Killed Aug. 4, 1944. 20 years old.

That was all I knew about the man whose grave my wife and I were on the way to visit. Kathy and I were on a delayed honeymoon in Europe, a month-long trip that had already taken us to Germany, Holland and Paris. Now, with a week left before we headed home, we were making good on a promise to a friend back home.

Pat Callahan didn’t know much about John Juba either; his half-brother had been killed before he was born. Pat didn’t know how he died; only that he was buried in France in a grave no one in the family had ever seen. He asked if my wife and I would mind visiting the cemetery on our vacation, maybe take a picture of the gravestone for his mother.

If it’s on your way, of course, Pat said when he handed me the directions, and that was how we left it.

It wasn’t on our way, as it turned out, but all through our vacation the X marked beside Marigny on our map of France nagged at us. I’d never met Pat’s mother. Was she wondering if we’d found the cemetery? Did she wait to hear what the place where her son was buried looked like? In the end, we didn’t want to disappoint a woman who’d lost her first son in a war and never had the chance to pray at his grave. The day after we arrived in Paris we set out by train for Marigny, about 300 miles to the west.

Four hours later, the taxi we hired at the St. Lo station raced through the rolling Normandy countryside, quickly eating up the nine miles left of our journey. For the first time that day I began to relax. We’d find the grave, take some pictures and make it back to Paris for a boat ride on the Seine without any problem.

I didn’t know there were any Americans buried in Marigny anymore, the taxi driver said over his shoulder.

I was still trying to explain, in my rusty French, about the directions in my hand and how there had to be an American cemetery there because that’s where this soldier was buried, when the cabbie turned off the highway toward Marigny and pointed to a sign planted in a grassy traffic island.

German military cemetery, it said in French and German. Kathy and I were staring at each other now, beginning to panic. They just don’t pick up cemeteries and move them, I said. It’s got to be there.

We came to a sleepy Main Street of stone shops, and the cabbie stopped to consult a woman on the sidewalk.

American cemetery? she said, yes, there used to be one outside of town, but it’s not there anymore. There are only Germans there now.

I wasn’t ready to give up yet. Maybe the Americans are buried with the Germans, I suggested to the driver. He shook his head, but drove on. A few miles out of town, on a narrow road that wound its way through apple orchards and pastures, he turned onto a dirt driveway and pulled up in front of a tall, stone fence.

Behind it, we found a tree-shaded meadow lined with neat rows of yellow rosebushes, like Normandy’s hedgerows, stretching to the horizon. This was a curious cemetery.

There weren’t many gravestones visible, just groups of brown crosses set in a row and staggered among the rosebushes. The graves 11,169 of them, we learned from a brochure in the chapel were marked by stone rectangles set into the earth. We only needed to read a few of the names inscribed on them, Heinz, Friedrich, Gunther, to realize that our search for John Juba’s grave hadn’t ended. It had just begun.

I think it was about 15 years ago they moved all the American graves, the cabbie told us on the way back to St. Lo. As far as I know, there’s only one American cemetery in Normandy now. It’s a big one up north at Colleville sur Mer, on the shore. You could take a train to Bayeux and get a taxi out there. It’s only about 30 kilometers.

We were hot, tired and hungry, but neither of us wanted to stop yet. We got on another train, and in less than an hour, a taxi deposited us in front of the visitors building at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial.

In Normandy, we find a clue

In the office we found Pedro Rivera, a New Mexico native who was the cemetery’s superintendent and asked for his help. Yes, he told us, there had been an American cemetery at Marigny once, but it was a temporary one. After the war, the graves were moved to permanent cemeteries like this one perched on a cliff overlooking Omaha Beach and the English Channel.

He reached up to a wall shelf lined with half a dozen thick, black books, pulled one down and began flipping pages lined with columns of tiny print. If John Juba were buried overseas, Rivera said, his name would be in here. The books contained the names of American war dead buried overseas or commemorated as unknown or missing: 35,000 names from World War I and more than 182,000 from World War II.

American war dead like in cemeteries around the world, Rivera told us, but a Normandy casualty could be found in only two places. Here, on the site of the largest amphibious assault in the history of the world, or in another cemetery about 60 miles south, in the province of Brittany.

Here he is, the superintendent said, his finger stopping at the bottom of a page. John Juba Jr. He was a Pfc. He paused and then looked up at us.

Oh, I’m sorry, he said. He’s in Brittany.

At least we’ll be able to tell his mother where he is buried, I told Kathy outside the visitors building. She nodded, but we were both disappointed. We had a few hours to catch our train back to Paris, so we strolled in the cemetery, mixing with the crowds of schoolchildren, families of tourists and a contingent of French soldiers. The cemetery draws more than a million people a year, Rivera told us.

We passed by a 22-foot bronze statute of a young man. The Spirit of American Youth rising from the Waves. The dead at Normandy lie under a carpet of grass kept green by lawn sprinklers waving back and forth over the white-marble headstones, 9,386 of them, set in single-file rows that reach to infinity. Beyond them, we came to the cliffs of Normandy and gazed down at the beach hundreds of yards below.

From books and movies, I knew something about the history made on this spot, but it was hard to imagine it then.

It was raining on D-Day. Today the sun was warm, the sky as blue as the water and dotted with puffy white clouds. Not an armada of ships, just a single sailboat; no dead, just a lone family sunbathing on the beach.

You know, if we stop now, Kathy said, all we can bring back is what they gave us in the first place: an address.

I was surprised she wanted to go on. By now, we knew that visiting John Juba’s grave was going to mean spending another vacation day doing it. We’d have to return to Paris first and then set out again this time for Brittany.

I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to quit, I said. We tried.

‘It’s become a pilgrimage’

I know, she said, but we can’t stop now. She smiled. It’s become a pilgrimage, like going to Lourdes.

The train to Paris was crowded, and we had to take seats apart. Kathy sat opposite two American college kids who, it turned out, had been at Normandy that day too. Omaha Beach attracted them for a reason different from ours though.

We went, said the taller of the pair, otherwise identical in shorts and nylon backpacks, to lie on the beach, you know, catch some rays.

John Juba was 18 years old, about the same age as these two college kids when he was drafted out of trade school in 1942. Everyone called him Johnny. He loved to play football and baseball. He was engaged to a girl named Dorothy.

We didn’t know any of this when we were searching for his grave. It wasn’t until we returned home that I learned more about him from his mother, Mrs. Ann Callahan, 76, who lives in the Hartford Park Housing Project in Providence.

Johnny grew up in New Kensington, Pa., where the family lived at the time. He wasn’t happy to be drafted, his mother said. But she recalled a letter he once wrote from overseas.

I’d rather be here, he wrote, than see a man that has a family.

He stepped on a mine and it blew his legs off, his mother said. He was still alive in the hospital, but when he found he lost his legs, the shock killed him,

John Juba’s resting place

It was raining two days later when we stepped out of a taxi at the gate to the Brittany American Cemetery and Memorial. There was no one in sight and the visitors building was locked. We were headed for the graves when I realized that I had forgotten to bring flowers.

It had taken 37 years for someone to visit John Juba’s grave and I wanted it to be a special occasion. Kathy was right. This was a pilgrimage, a journey to the grave of a soldier who could have been anyone’s son, brother, father, husband. In some unspoken way, I felt that we had become his family, at least for this one day, and I knew that his family would have brought flowers.

Wait here, I told Kathy and set off the rural highway in search of wildflowers. I was about to settle for a flowering carrot weed when I heard a radio through the open window of a stone farmhouse and saw beside it a garden bursting with white roses and snapdragons.

The old man who answered the back door wore scuffed black clogs, gardening clothes and a cap. His apple cheeks were whiskery with white stubble. I had interrupted his lunch; behind him, in the spartan, stone kitchen, a bowl of bread, cheese and cherries sat on a table covered with an oilcloth.

In my clumsy French, I told him about our search for the American soldier’s grave and asked for permission to pick a few flowers from his garden. He turned away without a word.

I was about to leave myself ready to believe that the French do hate all Americans when he reappeared with a pair of pruning shears. He waved away my suggestion of payment. Bring your wife back with you after you’ve seen the grave, he said. We’ll visit and drink some wine.

The graves at Brittany lie beyond the Wall of the Missing, 4,313 white crosses and Stars of David lined up on a manicured field like a marching band at half time. Five varieties of grass keep it green all year round. The cemetery was empty and so quiet we could hear the rain falling on the flower beds bordering the graves.

Granite stones in the grass marked each section. I saw one labeled D on the right and ran over, excited and nervous at the same time. What if he wasn’t here either?

Over here, I yelled to Kathy, a hundred yards behind me. I cringed as my shout broke the stillness, and a man appeared in the window of a house next door. Within moments he emerged, a middle-aged man in a tan raincoat who introduced himself as Donald Davis, the superintendent of the cemetery.

D-10-8, he said. That’s right down here. He led us down nine rows of graves, turned down the tenth and began to count off crosses. At the eighth, we stopped and found John Juba’s name cut into the white marble.

I laid the flowers in front of the cross and knelt to take a picture for his mother.

Wait. Davis bent down and turned the bouquet around so the flowers faced the camera. Otherwise, all you’ll get is a picture of the stems.

Every trade had its secrets.

Rest in peace, John, I said under my breath.

‘The Young Who Died Delivered Us”

The old Frenchman was outside trimming his rosebushes when we returned. He invited us into the kitchen, where the air was tangy with wood smoke, and poured port wine into three china cups.

His name was Piere Letranchant. He was 72 years old and for most of his life had lived in this farm country outside St. James. His wife’s family, in fact, had once owned the 27 acres of land where John Juba was buried. It had been a dairy farm until the Americans bought it after the war.

The cemetery was quiet most of the time, he said, except in November or on the last day of May when crowds come. Those are your holidays, no?

But young people like you, he said, shaking his head, they never come to visit. The young have forgotten all this. He didn’t sound angry, just a little sad.

What have they forgotten? we asked.

That the young who died delivered us, he said. The young, they should come here.

(This story first appeared in The Providence Journal Sunday Magazine, 1980.)

Revision as sculpture: Three Questions with Matt Tullis

Interviews

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?

Revision is where writing can go from good to great, or mediocre to good, or bad to mediocre. This is a lesson that I’ve learned later in life, especially after I got out of daily newspaper reporting (especially my days at a small newspaper where I wrote two stories a day, every day). It’s a lesson that I preach to my undergraduate students, even when they are doing basic, 400-word live-event coverage stories. This is especially important when it comes to doing narrative work. I tell my students in my Literary Journalism class that we’re going to be sculptors, and their first draft is just going to be the raw stone. They need to get it all out there, and then we’ll start chipping away until it becomes a wonderful piece of journalism in story form. The best revision also happens when you have an editor who has also bought into telling the best story possible, someone who can stand back and look at the story in a way the reporter/writer can’t. We like to think of writing as a solitary endeavor, and in some forms of writing, it can be. But narrative or literary journalism should be anything but solitary. 

What’s been the biggest surprise of your writing life?

I think the biggest surprise for me has been the fact that I’ve gotten into broadcast writing with Gangrey: The Podcast. One of my classes as an undergrad was a “Writing For The Media” class, and we had some broadcast writing that we had to do there, and I was like, I will never do this type of writing. I was going to be a newspaper reporter and I was always going to write for people’s eyes, not their ears. And then I started doing the podcast. I’ve spent so much time working on getting better at writing the introductions to my various guests and writing promos and other types of stuff. Additionally, with the podcast, I’ve absolutely fallen in love with audio production. I love interviewing other reporters and writers about their work, but I really look forward to putting that together in an increasingly more complex type of production. And I’m constantly thinking about other possible podcasts that I can try and get off the ground, stuff that is more than just interviews, and as such, will require more production work. I never thought that is the direction my writing would go.

If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be and why? 

The best I can come up with is simply the fact that my writing is all over the map. I’m writing now more than I ever have, but it’s not necessarily always going places that we think of when we think about writing. Earlier this year, I was raising money for Dylan’s Wings of Change, one of the charities that sprang up after the Sandy Hook shooting, and I thought long and hard about the writing I posted on Facebook asking for contributions. I even revised that stuff! But I’m also writing for my podcast, which is different from the writing I’ve done for Nieman Storyboard, which is different from what I’ve done for The Daily Beast, all of which is different from my book, “Running with Ghosts, ” which is also different from the pieces of journalism I wrote for SB Nation Longform back before it shut down in 2016. Right now, I’m working on a new book project that I hope to have a publisher for soon (there’s another type of writing I’ve been doing – the book proposal) that will focus on how to report and write narrative journalism, which uses my podcast interviews as source material.
There’s also a myriad of other types of writing I want to do someday. I’ve got a couple movie ideas bouncing around in my head that I would love to write screenplays for. I just started my first piece of fiction since I was in grad school back in 2004 (it will probably never see the light of day) the other day after I went on a run and this idea popped into my head. And of course, I’m always thinking of new possibilities for the podcast. I am, quite frankly, all over the place.

Matt Tullis is an assistant professor of English and the director of the Digital Journalism program at Fairfield University. He is the author of “Running With Ghosts: A Memoir of Surviving Childhood Cancer,” which was published by The Sager Group in August 2017. Tullis is also the host and producer of Gangrey: The Podcast, which focuses on narrative journalism and the reporters who write it. Tullis was a newspaper reporter for 10 years before joining academia, and has written for regional and city magazines, as well as trade publications. He’s been a notable selection in “Best American Sports Writing” three times and “Best American Essays” once. 

Craft Query: How would you answer these questions?

May the writing go well.

Photograph by Annie Spratt courtesy of unsplash.com

Why I Write and Why You Should, Too

Craft Lessons
The punishment of Sisyphus, on an antique jar/Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich

Why do you write?

What brings you to your desk every day?

Do you seek fame?

Fortune?

The Pulitzer Prize?

There’s nothing wrong with these goals.

But sometimes, the going gets rough and your dreams seem far out of reach. Your latest story just got its tenth rejection, an editor just turned down your pitch, an agent said try elsewhere. Or you’re supposed to be writing but are just spinning your wheels,; you hate your latestsdraft but you don’t know how to fix it.

At times like this,  it can be useful to consider why you chose this life in the first place.

Who wouldn’t want Hollywood or a famous literary agent with a stable of writers you admire to come calling? Who wouldn’t be thrilled to land a coveted assignment based on the strength of your news stories?

I certainly harbored those dreams of glory and success as I toiled as a newspaper reporter, later wrote short stories, a screenplay and a full-length play. I imagined my name in lights on Broadway. Still waiting.

The reality is that you have no power over how your work will be received. You can only control what you write. Everything after that is up to other people.

So why should you bother? Writing is hard, lonely work. It keeps you from your family and friends. It robs you of time to leisurely watch the world go by. If you’re not careful, it can suck the life out you.

It can be tedious, especially when you’re struggling to find the right architecture for your story. Writing can be an uphill slog as you build your characters into vivid, believable creatures or render scenes that bring drama and comedy to life.

It can be especially hard when a story you’ve been working on for months just won’t come to life. It has good points, a beginning that came out of nowhere, or a voice or point of view that you’re proud to reveal.

But the middle is a muddle and no matter how hard you try the ending is flat.

I wish I wasn’t speaking from experience, but I am, so as I look at this latest short story for perhaps the 20th time, I find myself asking, why bother? It would be so easy to throw the drafts into the trash, hit the delete button and move on. I understand Amazon has openings in its fulfillment centers.

There’s only one reason to write

There’s only one plausible reason why anyone would commit to this life: you love the craft of writing for the sake of it. It’s the single most important reason why you, or anyone, would — or should — choose this path.

It’s not only for the talented, but for those who understand that, as the French master Gustave Flaubert said in a letter to Vincent van Gogh, “talent is a long patience and originality an effort of will and intense observation.”

And then I realized why I keep trying. Because sitting at your desk trying to make meaning out of words brings meaning to your own life and, if you’re fortunate, to others who read your work, even if for now, it’s a small but loyal audience of family and friends.

Knowing why you write can help you when the struggles seem Sisyphean, a burden as overwhelming as the one the doomed Greek king was forced to carry up a hill every day only to see it roll down.

Writing demands resilience as much as talent and discipline. And the rewards are elusive.

So it can be helpful and inspiring to learn why other writers have answered the question that plumbs their motivation.

Why others write

Joan Didion answered it in an essay called, “Why I Write.”

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Flannery O’Connor, the Southern writer, said she wrote “because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

Aerogramme Writer’s Studio collected the thoughts of twenty-one writers who answered the questions in a variety of ways. As a former investigative reporter, one of my favorites came from the British journalist George Orwell:

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”

Indian author Nitya Prakash also has others in mind. He is motivated by a desire to tell untold stories, to give voice to the voiceless and to heal.

“I write,” he says, “for those that have no voice, for the silent ones who’ve been damaged beyond repair; I write for the broken child within me…”

These are all valid and valuable reasons to write. They helped after I asked myself why I write after a long and exhausting day, juggling freelance assignments, blogging, coaching and trying to find time to work on my own writing.

I shouldn’t complain. I’m grateful for the gigs and the freedom to write.

Even so, it’s a feeling we all have when facing a story is the last thing you want to do.

There has to be an easier, less stressful way to spend my time on earth. I’m pretty sure you say the same thing from time to time.

That’s why the reason that spoke to me most deeply as someone who spends his days at the keyboard came from the writer and activist Gloria Steinem. “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”

Come up with reasons to write

But I knew I had to come up with my own answers to understand what compelled me to get me through the days when I imagined I could be happier doing something else.

I write because:

  • I have to.
  • It makes me feel whole.
  • It exercises my brain.
  • It fuels my creativity.
  • It feeds my soul.
  • It immerses me in the life of the mind.
  • It fills my psychic bank with optimism and hope.
  • It makes me money, not much, but green stuff nonetheless.
  • It makes me feel like an artist, an explorer, a seeker of truth.
  • It puts me in a state of flow.
  • It represents a challenge worth tackling.
  • It lets me write the stories only I can do.
  • It deepens my understanding of the human condition.
  • It makes me see the art of the possible.
  • It’s a gift I have to keep deserving.

I hope some of my reasons help you decide why you should write. But you should come up with your own.

All of us are storytellers, whether we do it with a pencil and paper, a laptop or a video camera. It’s in our DNA, the human impulse to create, to remember someone familiar or to create someone you’ve never imagined before you sat down to write.

Ask yourself: Why do I write? The answers will keep you going when all seems lost and you wonder why you’re spending your days and nights wrestling with words.


Sally Jenkins on the glazed donut of thinking

Writers Speak

“I’m continually, constantly, everlastingly, refreshingly surprised by how hard writing is. It’s like a case of amnesia — between stories I forget how awful it was. But I remember again as soon as I sit down in front of the computer. I’m also surprised by how much writers fumble around in the dark, just hoping for a blast of fortunate inspiration. And I’m surprised by what a minor factor inspiration is in the overall process. It helps. But frankly, it’s the glazed donut of thinking. Writing is breaking rocks with a shovel. It takes a certain kind of strength.”

SALLY JENKINS

Coping with literary rejection

Bookbag
Photo by Matt Jones on Unsplash

Whenever I received a rejection letter for a short story I’ve submitted to a magazine or literary journal I have had this fantasy.

After receiving theirs — “Thank you for your submission. We are sorry that it does not meet our editorial needs at this time.” — I would send back one of my own boilerplate replies:

“Thank you for your rejection. I’m sorry that it does not defeat my literary dreams at this time.”

Over the years, I’ve been a student of rejection, having experienced my share over the years. Pitches repulsed. Stories that never found a home. Books that didn’t sell. So I’ve taken perverse pleasure learning from this list of the “Most Rejected Books of All Time (Of the Ones That Were Eventually Published)” that even famous and best-selling authors heard no — over and over.

But in “Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year,” Kim Liao goes beyond the numbers to capture the paradox of the writer’s life.

“Yes, we should be unswerving in our missions to put passion down on paper, unearthing our deepest secrets and most beautiful bits of humanity. But then, later, each of us must step back from those raw pieces of ourselves and critically assess, revise, and—brace yourself—sell them to the hungry and unsympathetic public. This latter process is not only excruciating for most of us (hell, if we were good at sales we would be making good money working in sales), but it can poison that earlier, unselfconscious creative act of composition.”

Liao, an essayist and fiction writer, recounts how her experience with rejection and the advice of a friend led her to shoot for 100 rejections a year. 

By actively seeking rejections, her perspective has changed in a way that should help anyone wrestling with the pain of turndowns of their work. 

“Now, I see rejection as a conversation: for every piece that is rejected, at least one other person read it, thought about it, and really considered whether it would be a good fit for publication. What’s more, it’s a conversation between two minds that truly love literature, as the financial margins of journals and small presses are slimmer than the sheaf of pages that I carry with me each day to revise before going to my day job.

It’s a witty and wise essay.

It should take the sting out of your next rejection and prompt you to send your story out in the world once more hoping for the joy of acceptance, or, at the very least, the muted pleasure of an encouraging rejection letter.

May the writing go well!


Put ends first

Craft Lessons

In the world of newswriting, leads get most of the attention, but endings are equally, if not more, important

Photo by Keith Johnston on Unsplash

The quote has become the default ending in journalism and readers and writers are all poorer for it.

The other day I randomly picked some news websites, clicked on stories, and scrolled to the bottom. Try it yourself. Open a story, and let your eyes drift to the end. There they are, those disembodied voices that bring way too many news stories to a close.

“It’s just an interesting old building.”

“People are scared,” Covington Allison said. “County government should make sure all people are taken care of. … Do the the right thing.”

“Some of these nighttime collisions are due to chance, but much more often the nocturnal migrants are lured to their deaths by the lights,” the lab reports.

Ending a story with a quote is a reflex action, understandable, especially in the crush of deadline, but overused to the point of cliché. Worse, the kicker quote deprives writers — and more important, readers—of other, more effective ways to make their stories memorable.

In the world of newswriting, leads get most of the attention, but endings are equally, if not more, important.

If leads are like “flashlights that shine down into the story,” as The New Yorker’s John McPhee once put it, endings can be eternal flames that keep a story alive in a reader’s head and heart.

Ending a story with a quote is a reflex action, understandable, especially in the crush of deadline, but overused to the point of cliché. Worse, the kicker quote deprives writers — and more important, readers—of other, more effective ways to make their stories memorable.

At the end of her three-part narrative series, “Metal to Bone” in the St. Petersburg Times, Anne Hull used a fact instead of a quote to convey the impact of a street crime on a woman police officer.

Lisa rarely thinks of Eugene, although she refuses to leave her back exposed, even while having dinner at a restaurant. Her back is always against a wall.

“You can’t have a decent story if it doesn’t leave you with a strong feeling or sense of image,” says Rick Bragg, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

Bragg’s Pulitzer Prize-winning package of stories offers an object lesson for writers and editors looking for different options for a story’s ending.

Two stories end in quotes. A profile of the southern Sheriff who persuaded a mother to confess that she drowned her two children and blamed a black man for the crime concludes with a comment from the cop: “Susan Smith is smart in every area,” he said, “except life.”

A story about an Alabama prison for elderly and disabled inmates ends with a comment about undertaking students at a local university who prepare prisoners’ bodies for burial: 

“They make ’em up real nice,” the warden said.

In a profile of a black Indian of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Bragg certainly had the material to use the same device.

Mr. Bannock sits and sweats in his house, working day and night with his needle. He has never had time for a family. He lives for Fat Tuesday.

“I need my mornin’ glory,” he said.

Most writers would have ended the story there with that colorful quote, but Bragg chose a detail instead that struck the chord of his theme: one man’s devotion to a tradition larger than himself.

A few years ago he had a heart attack but did not have time to die. He had 40 yards of velvet to cut and sew.

There are several reasons why, when faced with a blank space at the end of a story, most reporters plug in a quote.

One is expediency; it’s a quick and easy way to finish.

Anxiety is another possibility for rookies and veteran journalists alike. The ending will leave the reader with the most definitive statement on the takeaway from the story. It feels “safer,” and less like editorializing, to put that on a source than yourself as the reporter. But no one knows a story better than the writer; it’s their right — and responsibility — to end the story in a way that has the most accurate and powerful impact.

But there’s another subtler explanation, that has to do with the process of reporting. 

Reporters often begin in the dark, uncertain about the meaning of the events or issues that they must chronicle or explain. At least once during this confusing journey, the reporter hears — or reads — something that produces a moment of sudden clarity.

The words jump off a page or emerge from a source’s mouth and into the notebook or audio recorder, and suddenly the reporter grasps the meaning. The squawky violin plays a true note. The piece slides into the puzzle. All that’s missing are the quote marks. 

And the very next thought is, “Whew! I’ve got my ending!”

That moment helps the reporter understand the story, but it doesn’t have the same effect on the reader who hasn’t come along on the same journey of discovery and who needs different kinds of information to satisfactorily complete the reading process.

“My advice to young people is to know what your ending is before you start writing.”

Ken Fuson, Des Moines Register

“A good ending absolutely, positively, must do three things at a minimum,” says Bruce DeSilva, former Associated Press writing coach.

  1. Tell the reader the story is over.
  2. Nail the central point of the story to the reader’s mind.
  3. Resonate. “You should hear it echoing in your head when you put the
    paper down, when you turn the page [or scroll down the screen.] It shouldn’t just end and have a
    central point,” DeSilva says. “It should stay with you and make you
    think a little bit. The very best endings do something in addition to
    that. They surprise you a little. There’s a kind of twist to them
    that’s unexpected. And yet when you think about it for a second, you
    realize it’s exactly right.

“My advice to young people is to know what your ending is before you start writing,” says Ken Fuson, one of the greatest stylists at the Des Moines Register.

In some cases, the writer just needs to reorganize. Take that kicker quote and move it up higher, to buttress a description, or punctuate a section. Find something else that reinforces the story’s theme. Think harder about the ending. Write the ending first so you’ll have a destination to aim for. Or at least know what it is.

Ideally, every story should build to a logical conclusion, and the best stories should have endings that resonate beyond the last word.

Sometimes, a quote ending seems the most appropriate way to bring a story to a close.

In his October 2019 story about a Wisconsin county doctor who has spent decades in a small town, and became an expert treating Amish families with rare diseases, Mark Johnson of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel uses a kicker quote to explain the doctor’s decision to stay local instead of moving to the city. “Yet it is just this setting,” he says in the final paragraph, “that has allowed it to become one of the most interesting practices I could ever have imagined.”

Whatever ending you choose, don’t make it an afterthought. Very few readers will return to that brilliant lead you sweated over. The last thing they’ll read, if you’ve done your job right, is the end. Make it count.

Dan Barry of The New York Times, and the author of “This Land: America Lost and Found,” met that standard in “The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail: An epic tragedy on a small block in Queens,” the powerful 2018 longform story he produced with Jeffrey E. Singer.

The story recounts the mysterious death of Song Yang, a Chinese immigrant sex worker who dies during a police raid. At the end of the story, her mother pays a tribute. It doesn’t end with a quote. Instead:

One evening, Shi paused outside a building where some women were offering massages to passing men. Raising the drooping bags held in her hands, she explained that she had just left the food pantry at the Episcopal church on Main Street, where she had recently been baptized. She said the pastor had emphasized the importance of sharing what you have.

The mother placed a bag of sweet potatoes in the doorway that had once been Song Yang’s domain. It was an offering of sorts, a gift to women like her daughter. Then she was gone, assumed into the Flushing blur.

I asked Barry, in a recent interview for Nieman Storbyoard, why he chose that ending.

“If I’m going to take the reader through 9,500 words,” he said, “the last sentence better be goddamn good. It has to be worth the journey.”

I blew it with an ending more than once, but one sticks in my head. 

It was a story about Joe DeMilio, a man who smoked all his life, woke with a cough on Thanksgiving and by the following Mother’s Day he was dead from lung cancer. 

When I interviewed his widow, Marie, at their home, I asked for a tour. (Reporting tip: always ask for a tour. You can find revealing details that enliven a story and speak volumes about character.)

In their bedroom, Marie looked at the bed she shared with her husband for decades. I ended the story with Marie talking to me.

 “It feels like one big nightmare,” she says. “Maybe I will wake up, and he will be in bed with me. But I know it’s not going to be so. Would you believe it? I take his aftershave lotion and spray it on his pillow just so I can smell him. Just the smell of it makes me feel like he’s with me.”

I’ve regretted that kicker quote ever since. How much stronger the story, I think, had it ended with a narrative ending:

“It feels like one big nightmare,” she says. “Maybe I will wake up, and he will be in bed with me. But I know it’s not going to be so.” Before she gets in bed at night, Marie DeMilio sprinkles her husband’s aftershave on her pillow. Just to feel close to him.

Next time, before you hit send, ask yourself if you can’t find a replacement for that quote ending, one that will linger in your readers’ minds.

Adapted from a column which appeared on Poynter Online