Teach yourself good story flow

It’s been a while since the fellow journalism nerds and I played a game I like to call "Newswriting Skeleton." Only serious journalism nerds will even attempt this. I'm talking reeeeeally nerdy: tape-on-your-glasses, toilet-paper-on-your-shoe, high-waisted-pants-with-suspenders and a-bust-of-Bob-Woodward-on-your-nightstand-with-accompanying-shrine nerdy.

Get a newspaper or online news story, and on a piece of paper write down the generic description of each paragraph in a story. The goal of Newswriting Skeleton is to see who can describe the accomplishment of each paragraph in generic terms most thoroughly and in the fewest words.

Generic, Thorough, and Concise.

For example, if the news story is 20 paragraphs, you’ll end up with 20 descriptions. Let’s take The Washington Times story about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, referenced in my September 27, 2011 posting:

(Again, note to IP lawyers who might consider suing me for this: Please notice that this is for educational purposes and I am only quoting three paragraphs out of the story’s total of 28.):

PARAGRAPH 1: Political icon Benazir Bhutto was killed in a suicide attack, all but ending a bid by moderate civilian politicians to take on militant Muslims who have made Pakistan the hub for global terrorism.

PARAGRAPH 2: Mrs. Bhutto, 54, had just finished addressing a campaign rally of her Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in Rawalpindi, a suburb of the capita, Islamabad.

PARAGRAPH 3: As she rose through the sunroof of her lightly armored sport utility vehicle, an assassin hit the opposition leader and former prime minister with at least two bullets before blowing himself up.

PARAGRAPH 4: (I won't write it, but it's a quote from a senior PPP leader commenting on the significance of the assassination).

Your list of descriptions might look like the following:

1.     Title, Who, died and how, significance.

2.     Subject's age, what she was doing just prior to death, where.

3.     Details of subject's death, additional bio info.

4.     Quote from subject's people on significance of her death.

Do this Newswriting Skeleton exercise for an entire story. Do it for several stories. Invite your fellow nerds over for a Saturday night party to do a bunch of them. You can rank each other's paragraph as you review your descriptions together. You can determine who had the description of each paragraph that accomplished the three goals the best: Generic, Thorough, and Concise.

Keep each story and paperclip to it each corresponding paragraph description you wrote. You can review them regularly. You'll see how these story patterns can be used for similar stories by just changing the nature of the subject, dates, locations, etc..

After a while, I think you’ll see how this teaches at least two things:

-Flow (how the story unfolds)

-Thoroughness (what details are necessary to offer readers)

You’ll really start to notice patterns emerge, especially if you do it with some obits (see earlier blog postings on obits). Seeing these patterns will influence your own writing so that you also achieve excellent story flow and thoroughness of necessary details.

While your local major market daily will work fine (Chicago Tribune, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Seattle Times, etc…) I recommend this and other exercises using USA Today and The Washington Times – each has short, clear sentences. Save the New York Times and The Washington Post for later, after you feel comfortable with this exercise … I mean, amazingly fun game. 

Start off with hard news, especially the police beat, and know it well before branching out to metro news, world, features, sports, lifestyle and celebrity. If I’m hiring a writer, I first look at clips of their hard news writing before I move on to their features.