I have a hunch that Mays had some restless nights as he cobbled together this wonderful profile — it appeared on this site yesterday — with the skill of a sportswriter with far more experience than he has.

Robert Mays III might be young, but he’s one talented writer.

His profile of Maclin, a story that finished second in the Profile category in the 2009-10 Hearst competition, shows the depth of his writing talent. Mays did an extraordinary job of getting inside Maclin’s life. He didn’t let obstacles get in the way; he seemed to know he had a good story to tell if he could build a trust with Maclin.

Well, this story is the result of what trust can do for a writer. It allowed Mays, who interned this summer at The Boston Globe, to share details about Maclin’s private life that flushed out what is Maclin’s public life. He made readers see the whole of Maclin, not just a mug shot.

Stories of this quality are always instructive for an aspiring sportswriter, because they offer plenty of teachable moments about the craft of writing well. Just as instructive are the insights a writer like Mays can provide about the process that led him to this finished work of art.

So thanks to an introduction from his Missouri classmate Andrew Astleford, I was able to ask Mays a series of questions about how he wrote the story. Here is what Mays had to say:

Question: Earlier, I talked to your friend Andrew Astleford about his award-winning story I showcased on my website. One question I posed to Andrew centered on his literary influences — in the journalistic sense. He had some writers whose work I’ve long respected. HIs list had great choices on it. So I’m curious about your list, Robert: What writers make your list, and can you talk about how reading these “influences” has shaped your nonfiction style?

Robert Mays III: Oh, jeez. Coming up with a list that stacks up to Andrew’s might be a problem, but let’s see.

I guess I would have to start with Chris Jones. I’m just so envious of how understated his work is. The piece that comes to mind right now is the profile he wrote of Roger Ebert in Esquire a couple of months ago, probably because it’s the most recent. His ability to bring emotions through in a story in a subtle way is amazing. It’s the skill I’d most like to have.

I also love Wright Thompson’s work, and not because he’s a Missouri guy. Wright’s so talented in so many ways, but as much as anything I try to pay attention to the way he uses his scenes. Not only the way he presents each individual one in terms of the amount of detail or their self-contained arc, but the way he chooses and organizes them as a part of the whole.

There are plenty of others. J.R. Moehringer is great with dialogue. Joe Posnanski writes with such a distinct voice. Mike Sager. Bill Reiter. Skip Hollandsworth. Gene Weingarten. Tom Friend. Charles Pierce. Gary Smith. Tom Junod. S.L. Price. I’m starting to look back at some of Michael Paterniti’s stories from the late ’90s. I feel very green in terms of the amount of great work I’ve read. I have a lot of learning to do.

Q: Not to compare you and Andrew, but in his story, he also used quotes sparingly — none in the last section of your piece. Is that something you learned at the University of Missouri? I mean, a lot of young sportswriters lard their writing with direct quotes. You didn’t. Why?

Mays: Don’t worry about the comparisons. I’ve worked in the same newsroom with the guy and been friends with him for long enough that I’m used to feeling bad about myself.

All kidding aside, the use of quotes is something that Jacqui Banaszynski harped on in our work with her. She talked a lot about how quotes as typically used can really slow down a story. The message was essentially that halting a 4,000-word story to use a quote that doesn’t add personality or voice does a piece no favors. With the story about Jeremy, I tried to be conscious of why I was using each quote. If I didn’t think it added voice or added to the scene, I didn’t use it.

Also, both Jacqui and another one of my professors at Missouri — Berkley Hudson — did a great job of stressing the distinction between quotes and dialogue. While quotes can slow down a story, dialogue can be a driving force. It can give a sense to the scene like a lot of visual details can’t.

Q: Writing is such a solitary act. How do you approach it? Do you write in quiet? Do you listen to music? Is the TV blaring in the background? How do you set yourself up for the actual task of writing?

Mays: I don’t think I do anything too special. I’m often in an environment that’s pretty quiet, such as one of the school’s libraries or the lounge in the same building as the newsroom. Both of those places also have ottomans, and I usually have my feet up. I’ve never really thought of that before.

I always listen to music when I write, but it’s never anything with lyrics — Miles Davis. Explosions in the Sky. Nine Inch Nails instrumentals. I usually write best in the afternoon, and it will often involve a cup or three of coffee.

In terms of the actual story itself, I try to work in pieces. Each time I sit down I don’t try to do more than what I feel is working. Sometimes that means a few paragraphs. Sometimes it means a scene. Sometimes it means two. I get up and walk around when I feel like I’m hitting a wall or getting worn out. Jacqui was big on making sure that we knew that procrastination was actually a form of routine. It can have a productive purpose. Obviously, with beat work and daily journalism that isn’t a luxury that people are often afforded, but when I wrote the Maclin story and the other longer pieces that I’ve written, that was my routine.

Q: As you know, a lead has to invite a reader into your story. I think yours does. Where did the idea for that descriptive opening come from? Did you worry that those details might drive some readers away early?

Mays: I actually worked on the story about Jeremy at the same time that another reporter was working on a series of videos documenting Jeremy’s preparation for the draft, and we were both at Jeremy’s surrogate parents’ house in Chesterfield when I saw the stack of helmets. I was in the middle of my reporting for the story, but as soon as I saw them I told Brian, the videographer, that I was probably going to lead with that scene. There are so many defining moments of Jeremy’s career at Missouri, but the story was about the evolution of a game and how he was forced to change along with it. I thought that the helmets were a clear representation of that progression. They alluded to each of the stops along the way, and to the uncertainty that the draft brought.

To be honest, I don’t remember ever worrying that the description might deter some readers. It’s obviously not the action-packed lede, but I think it’s true to the story. I hoped that the hint to each of the different steps in his career would be attractive enough to keep people reading.

Q: Talk to me a bit about the interviewing process: How did you get Jeremy Maclin to be so forthcoming with you? Did you know Maclin before the interview? He let you into his apartment, and that shows a trust he seemed to have with you, Robert. How were you able to build that trust?

Mays: Getting Jeremy to open up wasn’t easy. I didn’t know him at all before I started to report the story, and after I got his phone number from his surrogate parents, there were a couple weeks of unanswered phone calls. I actually drove all the way to Indianapolis for the NFL Scouting Combine to tell Jeremy that I was the one leaving all those messages.

The next week I talked to the strength and conditioning coach at Missouri about tagging along for a few of Jeremy’s workouts. That’s where everything really started. I showed up for his 8 a.m. workouts almost every day for several weeks. I didn’t use a lot of the material that I got from those sessions, but they were invaluable because they just let him know that I wasn’t going away. I was going to be around for as long as he’d have me, and I think he figured out that letting me into his life would be easier than trying to ignore me. He eventually let me make the trip back to Chesterfield to visit his surrogate parents’ house with him, and he also let me spend some time at his apartment in Columbia. The entire process just taught me how important the notion of “being there” is. There were plenty of times where I wasn’t using the notebook or the recorder, but I was hanging out enough to gain the trust I needed to get the answers when I asked.

Q: Here’s a paragraph I loved in your piece: “Most are the thin, precise remnants of a helmet screw or cleat. Together, they archive a decade of contact. But on the back of his left hand, one distinguishes itself. Half an inch long, thicker than the rest and raised a bit on his skin, it’s the eldest of the group.” I like to see this kind of detail in a story. Did you have second thoughts about using it? How did you and Maclin get on the topic of his scars?

Mays: I liked the image of the scars on his arms because it’s so literal. The notion of hardship is so abstract that it can get lost, but I hoped that by using a tangible image, that idea would be easier to communicate. It was really a throwaway conversation that I was having with him. His surrogate father told me about the big one on Jeremy’s hand during an earlier conversation, but the conversation with Jeremy was about as long as it reads in the story. I pointed them out, and he told me that he got most of them during games.

I don’t remember now, but I’m sure I had some doubts about using that image as the introduction to the scene about the problems Jeremy faced early on in his life. That story is one that people who follow Missouri football have heard plenty of times, and telling it in a way that was slightly different was something I struggled with as I reported and eventually wrote the story. Again, I guess I just liked how literal the image was and how smooth the transition from physical scars to emotional scars was.

Q: How many notes did you take for this piece? Do you remember how much good stuff you were forced to discard? Any regrets with killing some of it?

Mays: I filled about two small reporter’s notebooks for that story. It was one of the first projects that I had such an extended amount of time to work on, and if anything, I wanted to take too many notes rather than too few. When I visited his surrogate parents’ house in Chesterfield I wrote for the first couple hours that I was there. I still have some trouble deciding on the spot what details are important and which aren’t, so it leads to me taking a ton of notes that I eventually won’t use in the end.

I think that with any story that involves two months of reporting, there’s going to be stuff that gets left out. I had more about his childhood and his experiences in youth football. There are a ton of stories about Jeremy’s career at Missouri that I liked but didn’t see a good place for. I like that feeling, though. When I have to leave good stuff in my notebook, it reassures me about my reporting in a way. In my very limited experience, I’ve always found that I tend to overwrite and stretch a story when I don’t trust the depth of my reporting. With the story about Jeremy, I never felt like that because I had confidence in the material that I’d worked to get.

Q: A story like this one probably didn’t come together without some restless nights. Looking back on it, what did you find to be the hardest part of making this piece work? Did you know it had the makings of a Hearst winner when you finished it?

Mays: There were certainly some sleepless nights; I promise you that. I woke up at 4 a.m. and jotted down plenty of things in the notebook I kept next to my bed. The concerns were mostly about access. Jeremy isn’t the biggest talker, and at the beginning of the process I was just really worried that I wouldn’t get the type of time with him that I needed to make the story happen. Over time though, I realized that time with him wasn’t what I really needed. A lot of people have said that writing a profile isn’t about spending time with your subject. People aren’t typically as self-aware as we’d like them to be, and because of that, profile writing often hinges on the people that surround a subject rather than the actual person whom the story is about. That isn’t a new concept by any means, but as a young reporter it was important for me to learn it on my own. As I went about reporting the story, I discovered that I didn’t need the time with him that I was hoping for at first, and when I came to that conclusion it allowed me to focus my time on more valuable tasks.

In short, the answer to your last question would be, “Hell no.” I had absolutely no idea that the story would get the sort of recognition that it got. Self-editing is important, and being able to step away from a story that I’ve written in order to make objective changes to it is something that I’m trying to get better at. And while I think I’m good at not clinging to the story as I originally wrote it, when I spend that long reporting a story I think I can a little too close to it to judge it for what it might be as a final product. I thought it was probably the best thing I had done up to that point, but I had no thoughts about awards when it was first printed.

Three helmets, stacked on a set of shelves in a small alcove, are almost lost in the clutter of sports memorabilia that decorate the Chesterfield basement. They don’t stand out as prominently as the All-American certificate or the Sports Illustrated clippings. But each is important in understanding how Jeremy Maclin got here, and where exactly here is.

The replica helmet on the bottom of the stack is the most familiar and the most recent – black with a gold “M.” It symbolizes Maclin’s arrival in the consciousness of football fans throughout the country and the surest sign of what is to come.

The helmet on top is the red of Kirkwood High School, and just like the one that Maclin wore when football became more than fun. That’s when football became a future. Football could make you a legend.

The helmet in the middle is the oldest and the only authentic one. White with a red “1″ on the side, multicolored streaks of paint record the collisions that were the thrill of a game still in its infancy.

Another set of helmets sits in a case across the basement, a collection of miniature replicas from each of the NFL teams. Thirty-two teams and 32 possible destinations, each helmet the potential next symbol of a football journey more than a decade in the making.

Of the thousands of college football players who harbor what-if dreams of going pro, Maclin is a given to be one of the 250 who will be picked in next weekend’s NFL Draft. The 6-foot, 200-pound wide receiver is expected to be tapped in the first round and offered a contract worth up to $20 million.

For Jeremy Maclin, a young man whose talent, drive and luck carried him from a rough patch of Kirkwood to an elite suburban youth league to Missouri, here is the eve of the 2009 NFL Draft. And for him, the question is no longer if. It’s who. And how much.

Read More …

About 2,500 years ago, Socrates posed the question in Plato’s Phaedrus: “What, then, is the way to distinguish good writing from bad?” But as it turned out, he was just being a wise guy: the question was rhetorical. Hell-bent on discrediting the newfangled invention of writing, Socrates went on to argue that a written text, unlike speech, can only remind us of what we already know. “So it is with written words: you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say one and the same thing.”

We know this, of course, because Plato wrote the dialogue.

So despite Socrates’ objections, writing caught on–”big time,” as they never said in ancient Greece. And in the centuries since, teachers, editors, and writers themselves have tried to work out a reasonable answer to his rhetorical question: what does distinguish good writing from bad? And in what ways are good writers different from bad writers?

Here, with the hope of encouraging you to respond, are ten different answers.

• “A bad writer is a writer who always says more than he thinks. A good writer–and here we must be careful if we wish to arrive at any real insight–is a writer who does not say more than he thinks.”
  (Walter Benjamin, journal entry, in Selected Writings: Volume 3, 1935-1938)
• “The difference between a good and a bad writer is shown by the order of his words as much as by the selection of them.”
  (Marcus Tullius Cicero, “The Oration for Plancius,” 54 B.C.)
• “There are bad writers who are exact in grammar, vocabulary, and syntax, sinning only through their insensitivity to tone. Often they are among the worst writers of all. But on the whole it can be said that bad writing goes to the roots: It has already gone wrong beneath its own earth. Since much of the language is metaphorical in origin, a bad writer will scramble metaphors in a single phrase, often in a single word. . . .

Read More …

OXFORD, Miss. – Pardon Eli Manning if he doesn’t view himself as the latest legend-in-training in the first family of Southern football.

To Eli, Archie Manning is not the redheaded, scrambling Ole Miss quarterbacking icon of the late ’60s.

He’s simply Dad, someone Eli called when he sought permission to stay out late when he was in high school. If Dad answered, Eli would change his voice and ask for his soft-hearted mother Olivia.

To Eli, Peyton Manning is not the All-Pro QB of the Indianapolis Colts, the best passer in University of Tennessee history and star of Gatorade commercials.

He’s just an older brother who’d sit on the chest of football-trivia challenged baby brother until Eli could name all the Southeastern Conference schools.

For goodness sake, Eli hasn’t even read the entire book Manning, last year’s family autobiography. Eli said it’s because he’s heard most of those stories before, adding it’s like watching a movie he’s already seen.

So forgive the laid-back Eli, a 20-year-old third-year sophomore, if he doesn’t get lathered about the historical significance of becoming Ole Miss’s starting quarterback Saturday against Murray State.

“There might be more pressure on me being the brother of Peyton than the son of Archie, but I don’t worry about it,” said Eli, who was redshirted two years ago as a freshman and who served as Romaro Miller’s backup last season. “I work hard and prepare not because of what the fans expect, but because I want to be a good quarterback who knows what he’s doing out there.”

Eli’s coming

The last two times that Eli has played with fans in the stands, he left every indication he certainly knows what he’s doing.

His fourth-quarter performance in last year’s Music City Bowl was … well, the never-say-die heroics that you’d expect out of a quarterback with the name Manning on the back of his jersey.

Read More …

If, threatened with waterboarding, I were forced to choose the biggest writing problem I see, it would be the nut graf. It’s talked about a lot in Craft classes but I still find myself questioning students about why their stories don’t explain to readers why they should care.

What makes a good nut graf? I use the words sweep, context and road map. I want to know how the story will help explain the importance of an event, incident, or personality (the “sweep”). I want to know how the story fits into the history and culture of our times (the “context”). Finally, in a rich nut graf, I want to discover the themes, the landscape of the story, the “road map” that tells me where the story is going and whether I want to take that journey.

Said even more simply, a good nut graf tells readers what’s in it for them, what they’ll learn, and why they ought to take the time to read your story.

Read almost any consequential story in the Times, WSJ, or Daily News, and you’ll see good nut grafs. The same goes for broadcast scripts. In profiles of people, such as the live-ins that Craft I students are now working on, Prof. Svoboda calls the nut graf the “Joe is not alone”graf. What is it about ‘Joe’ that reflects a larger theme, a recurring pattern, an emerging trend? That’s a useful way of thinking about it.

The nut graf – btw, it’s not always just one graf, but one cohesive idea — is so important that I often recommend that reporters write it first, or at least make notes for the themes and details to include. That can start as you take notes, and can continue as you come back to the newsroom to file your stories. It’s important to think about what you’re about to write. Put yourself in the minds of the reader and ask why they should care. Force yourself to take the helicopter view, to see the story in all its dimensions, and then provide that perspective to the reader.

The nut graf also benefits the writer. By organizing the thinking about what makes the story important, the nut graf will give the writer a structure and organization that will allow the story to flow naturally from one theme to another. It also will allow the writer to more easily choose the best story-telling quotes and details to advance the arc of the story.

Rima Abdelkader’s recent story on how foreign media handle American colloquialisms – a story that helped push page views at NY City News Service to record levels – did a nice job of explaining why a reader should care:

Joe Sixpack. Hockey Mom. Maverick.
Even for those passionately following the presidential election, the definition of these campaign buzzwords can change with the voter, pundit or reporter who interprets them.
Imagine, then, how foreign language journalists must struggle to put the terms into context for their audiences when such words often have no direct translation.
That problem faced Al Jazeera reporter Abderrahim Foukara when he wrestled with how to describe “maverick.” The world’s most watched Arab network finally decided to define the American colloquialism as “a bird that sings outside the flock.”
For Al Jazeera, and foreign-language media throughout the world, the issue of how to translate the language of American politics is more than just a matter of journalistic accuracy. Their decisions reflect their own diverse histories and cultures, as well as their ethical guidelines about bias in translation.

The last three paragraphs provide a cohesive summary of why the reader should care: the sense of the story, a specific and interesting example and the sweep and context of the issue. It caught the attention of readers as diverse as the editors of the Huffington Post to an individual American blogger in Guatemala.

Last point: Whenever you read stories in print, scripts, online or blogs, find the “nut graf” and ask yourself whether it succeeded, and why. Take away those lessons and apply them to your own stories.

Writing Tips
Use storytelling quotes, not quotes that simply convey information better paraphrased by the writer. Craft professors, appropriately, urge students to make sure to put quotes high in their stories. But student reporters often overcompensate with too many boring or rambling quotes rather than a few sterling, storytelling ones.
My advice is to establish a very high standard for any quote. It must help you tell the story, reveal a personality or express outrage or joy. With many quotes, you can capture the essence and write it far stronger yourself.

Karina Ioffee used strong storytelling quotes in her story about Colombian parents who attended the sentencing of the man who had killed their son seven years ago:

Residents of Bogota, Colombia, Leonor and Armando Garzon got on the first flight to New York after hearing about the attack. Both parents sat with their son — one of three children — as he lay in a coma for weeks.
“I caressed him and talked into his ear, in case he might hear me,” Leonor Garzon said. “But he never woke up.”
“Our lives the past seven years have consisted of knocking on doors seeking help to bring to light this merciless and cruel crime that you committed,” Leonor Garzon said at the sentencing, speaking directly to McGhee. “You’ve deprived us of living a full life in our old age and of family unity….we can never be together again.”

Shout Outs

Everyone contributed mightily to our lights-out election coverage, which makes it hard to single out any one person. But Jere Hester deserves a loud shout out for the planning and leadership he provided for the entire effort.

I’m always looking for a felicitous phrase that shows writing chops. Here’s how Carla Murphy summarized what happens at a storefront church headed by the Rev. Terry Lee:

All rely on Lee’s storefront church, in which the Holy Spirit is invited to enter, wipe its feet, disrobe, chat, eat, drink, dance, jump and relax, for up to six hours at a time.

That satisfied my craving for active verbs, and whetted my appetite for more.

To read more of Heath Meriwether’s blogs, go to http://blogs.journalism.cuny.edu/writestuff/about/

The peculiar phenomenon of recklessly apostrophized plurals is nothing new. Lynne Truss’s prescriptive ancestors were ridiculing “grocer’s” back in the 19th century. And though apparently simple, the guidelines for using the apostrophe have been eccentrically applied since the mark first popped up in the 1500s. As editor Tom McArthur notes in The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992), “There was never a golden age in which the rules for the use of the possessive apostrophe in English were clear-cut and known, understood, and followed by most educated people.”

With customary reserve and indecision, we’ve declined to take sides in the Great Apostrophe Debate. But we would like to hear whether you think the apostrophe is worth preserving.

Pikes Peak, named after explorer Zebulon Pike, lost its apostrophe in 1891. That was the year that the newly formed U.S. Board on Geographic Names outlawed this seemingly innocent mark of punctuation: “The possessive form using an ‘s’ is allowed,” declared the Board, “but the apostrophe is almost always removed.”

Some would be quite happy to broaden the ban on that “morbid growth in English orthography,” as linguist Steven Byington characterized the mark. Writing in American Speech in 1945, he observed that “the language would be none the worse for its abolition.”

More recently, in an article bluntly titled “Axing the Apostrophe,” Adrian Room argued that apostrophes are simply unnecessary. So what, he said, if “we’ll” appears as “well” or “he’ll” as “hell.” Context, he insisted, “should soon show which word is meant, and grammatical parameters would make ambiguity unlikely” (English Journal, 1989).

Another knowledgeable opponent of apostrophes (those “uncouth bacilli,” in George Bernard Shaw’s words) is English teacher Peter Brodie, who also advocates abolition: “they are largely decorative, like the French circumflex, and–unlike the comma–rarely clarify meaning” (English Journal, 1995).

And just last month, Dr. John Wells, Emeritus Professor of Phonetics at University College, London, dismissed the apostrophe as “a waste of time.” Speaking at the centenary dinner of the Spelling Society, he asked, “Have we really nothing better to do with our lives than fret about the apostrophe?”

They were going to the post for the sixth race at Jamaica, 2-year-olds, some making their first starts, to go five and a half furlongs for a purse of four thousand dollars. They were moving slowly down the backstretch toward the gate, some of them cantering, others walking, and in the press box they had stopped their working or their kidding to watch, most of them interested in one horse.

“Air Lift,” Jim Roach said. “Full brother of Assault.”

Assault, who won the triple crown … making this one too, by Bold Venture, himself a Derby winner, out of Igual, herself by the great Equipoise … Great names in the breeding line … and now the little guy making his first start, perhaps the start of another great career.

They were off well, although Air Lift was fifth. They were moving toward the first turn, and now Air Lift was fourth. They were going into the turn, and now Air Lift was starting to go, third perhaps, when suddenly he slowed, a horse stopping, and below in the stands you could hear a sudden cry, as the rest left him, still trying to run but limping, his jockey — Dave Gorman — half falling, half sliding off.

“He broke a leg!” somebody, holding binoculars to his eyes, shouted in the press box. “He broke a leg!”

Down below they were roaring for the rest, coming down the stretch now, but in the infield men were running toward the turn, running toward the colt and the boy standing beside him, alone. There was a station wagon moving around the track toward them, and then, in a moment, the big green van that they call the horse ambulance.

“Gorman was crying like a baby,” one of them, coming out of the jockey room, said. “He said he must have stepped in a hole, but you should have seen him crying.”

“It’s his left front ankle,” Dr. J.G. Catlett, the veterinarian, was saying. “It’s a compound fracture; and I’m waiting for confirmation from Mr. Hirsch to destroy him.”

He was standing outside one of the stables beyond the backstretch, and he had just put in a call to Kentucky where Max Hirsch, the trainer, and Robert Kleber, the owner, are attending the yearling sales.

“When will you do it?” one of them said.

“Right as soon as I can,” the doctor said. “As soon as I get confirmation. If it was an ordinary horse I’d done it right there.”

He walked across the road and around another barn to where they had the horse. The horse was still in the van, about twenty stable hands in dungarees and sweat-stained shirts, bare-headed or wearing old caps, standing around quietly and watching with Dr. M.A. Gilman, the assistant veterinarian.

“We might as well get him out of the van,” Catlett said, “before we give him the novocaine. It’ll be a little better out in the air.”

The boy in the van with the colt led him out then, the colt limping, tossing his head a little, the blood running down and covering his left foreleg. When they saw him, standing there outside the van now, the boy holding him, they started talking softly.

“Full brother of Assault.” … “It don’t make no difference now. He’s done.” … “But damn, what a grand little horse.” … “Aint he a horse?”

“It’s a funny thing,” Catlett said. “All the cripples that go out, they never break a leg. It always happens to a good-legged horse.”

A man, gray-haired and rather stout, wearing brown slacks and a blue shirt, walked up.

“Then I better not send for the wagon yet?” the man said.

“No,” Catlett said. “Of course, you might just as well. Max Hirsch may say no, but I doubt it.”

“I don’t know,” the man said.

“There’d be time in the morning,” Catlett said.

“But in this hot weather–” the man said.

They had sponged off the colt, after they had given him the shot to deaden the pain, and now he stood, feeding quietly from some hay they had placed at his feet. In the distance you could hear the roar of the crowd in the grandstand, but beyond it and above it you could hear thunder and see the occasional flash of lightning.

When Catlett came back the next time he was hurrying, nodding his head and waving his hands. Now the thunder was louder, the flashes of lightning brighter, and now rain was starting to fall.

“All right,” he said, shouting to Gilman. “Max Hirsch talked to Mr. Kleberg. We’ve got the confirmation.”

They moved the curious back, the rain falling faster now, and they moved the colt over close to a pile of loose bricks. Gilman had the halter and Catlett had the gun, shaped like a bell with the handle at the top. This bell he placed, the crowd silent, on the colt’s forehead, just between the eyes. The colt stood still and then Catlett, with the hammer in his other hand, struck the handle of the bell. There was a short, sharp sound and the colt toppled onto his left side, his eyes staring, his legs straight out, the free legs quivering.

“Aw —-” someone said.

That was all they said. They worked quickly, the two vets removing the broken bones as evidence for the insurance company, the crowd silently watching. Then the heavens opened, the rain pouring down, the lightning flashing, and they rushed for the cover of the stables, leaving alone on his side near the pile of bricks, the rain running off his hide, dead an hour and a quarter after his first start, Air Lift, son of Bold Venture, full brother of Assault.

What makes a good lead?  Hint:  It’s usually not a question.

But it’s an answer we think a lot about here, particularly with a fresh cast of students. There’s no one right answer.  Jack Hart  talks about as many as 15 ways to start a story in his book, “A Writer’s Coach.”  Everyone agrees there’s no quicker way to lose your reader than a flat, uninteresting lead.

With that as both warning and encouragement, here are some quick thoughts about how to think about leads:

• Get to the point.  What happened? What do you want the reader to take away from your story? After you’ve covered an event, or done an interview, write a short note to yourself about what’s most important.  Write a three to six-word headline.  Expand the thought and you’ve got your lead.

• Imagine how you’d tell the story to a friend or family member.  You wouldn’t bury them in the details.  Jere Hester gives this example: Your mind is reeling after a day of reading campaign contribution records, arcane tax codes and dealing with political spin.  Mom calls:  “What are you working on today, honey?” You:  “Oh, a story about a congressman who pushed for a tax loophole that saved his top campaign contributor $10 million.” There’s your lead.

• Talk it through before you write.  That’s why God made editors, or Craft professors. Classmates, too.  That  quick chat often forces you, or your listener, to summarize what’s important. Prof. Hester was struggling with a feature about the discovery of a spotless leopard. He told one of the news clerks, who said, “Geez, you can’t even tell a leopard by its spots anymore.” Bingo!

• It’s the news, stupid! Give the reader the news, not circumstances and generalities. Steve Strasser provides this example: Don’t write that a senior city official attacked the mayor for corruption at a press conference Wednesday.  Say instead: The comptroller accused the mayor of padding his expense account.

• Assertive  sentences, Action verbs, Active Voice. Don’t back into the story.  Try to avoid the passive voice where the subject of the sentence is acted upon, rather than doing the acting.  Use strong verbs. Try to avoid forms of the “to be” verb (am, are, is, was, were, been). Caution: This can be overdone.  Active verbs, when forced, can distort or hype your story and make it read like a romance novel, warns writing coach Roy Peter Clark in his book, “Writing Tools.”
• Avoid modifiers.  They show insecurity. Prof. Strasser again: Most sophisticated, discerning readers will fully and readily understand the consuming and undeniable importance of the dramatic news of a sudden stock market crash without all those dang useless sludge-like ridiculously unnecessary modifiers.

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Warning: Disjointed rant about sportswriting ahead.

1. I’m not sure if I ever heard Jim Murray speak, unless you count the time I sat behind him on a media bus at the Super Bowl. For a generation, Murray was the most well-respected sportswriter in America. He earned this position based entirely on words, on phrasing, on the careful construction of an 800-word column in the Los Angeles Times. As far as I know, Murray didn’t appear regularly on television. He didn’t seem to care much for television. Here’s how he described television in his autobiography: “…the yawning maw that chewed up talent, novelty, news, history like a mindless, grazing shark, gobbled sports whole.”

Jim Murray died in 1998. Which, these days, seems like a hell of a long time ago.

2. This is not really about Jay Mariotti, or Jason Whitlock. I certainly don’t have a personal issue with either of them; I met Jay a few times many years ago, before he became the scourge of the blogosphere, and I found him perfectly nice. I’ve never met Whitlock, but we have a few mutual friends, and I find his public schtick and his columns amusing (and occasionally brilliant). Still, last weekend was one of the weirdest I can remember in the modern history of sportswriting: One day after Whitlock held a three-hour radio-broadcast “Explanation” for his departure from The Kansas City Star, Mariotti was arrested during a domestic dispute in Los Angeles, evoking unprecedented waves of schadenfreude from coast to coast. This, of course, was because Mariotti plays the heavy on a program calledAround the Horn, in which a panel of sportswriters engage in vigorous arguments for 23 minutes. Around the Horn, of course, is preceded by several programs in which sportswriters engage in vigorous argument, and it is followed by a program called Pardon the Interruption, in which two extremely talented sports columnists from Washington D.C. engage in vigorous (if good-natured) argument.

It’s all kind of amazing, when you think about it. For several hours a day, the airwaves are essentially dominated by people whose original avocation is/was the written word. Some of the best sportswriters in America have given up writing altogether. Others have emphasized their television work over their writing, because the money is simply too good to ignore.

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MELBOURNE, Australia – Jennifer Capriati was seated in a small garden outside Rod Laver Arena late this afternoon, at ease with the fuss around her, completely relaxed as the center of attention.

She was just moments away from leaving the grounds for a photo session reserved for the Australian Open champion, and yet she was far removed from a time when she bristled at the flashbulbs that flooded the infancy of her career.

In the early 1990′s, Capriati was simply “Jenny” to everyone. She giggled, twisted her hair and lit up every tournament she played in as the bubble-gum curiosity. Just after she won a gold medal in Barcelona, Spain, more than eight years ago, she said, “All week I watched the other athletes up there, and I thought, ‘Wow, that would be so cool.’ ”

A smitten public devoured the innocent reaction of the 16-year-old Capriati. For so long, nothing would ever top that moment for her. “I was thinking about that,” Capriati said today. “I mean, that actually seems like another life. So this is a new life, a different life. It’s actually like winning something for the first time again.”

Today, she experienced a rebirth of sorts. As Capriati unraveled the plot of top-seeded Martina Hingis, 6-4, 6-3, in the final of the Australian Open, she found closure. If nothing else, she tied up one loose-ended question: will she ever be the same again?

No, she is better. The 24-year-old Capriati is stronger, fitter and happier than she was when she turned pro 11 years ago. And more at peace with fame now than she was when she plunged into a dark adolescent period during the mid-90′s. If the corporate world that once dumped her during her tailspin comes charging toward her again, a more mature Capriati seems poised to handle it.

“I’m not going to let anything change me, change what I do or who I am,” Capriati said. “You know, I’m always going to do what I want. No matter how many companies or whatever comes at me, I’ll just always stick to what makes me comfortable.”

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