Sports Illustrated‘s Rick Reilly:
Of all the rich Gary Smith tapestries that hang, my favorite is Damned Yankee, the story of a five-year-old boy who accidentally kills his best friend with a homemade javelin and torments himself for 60 years over it, ruining a potentially great catching career with the Yankees.
Read it and see if you find a single “he said/she said” quote in it. There are none, only scenes, woven so perfectly together that you feel as if you’re in a movie that’s too good to go get popcorn. Gary never starts writing a piece until he’s spoken to 50 people. And not just once. Often, he calls them back a dozen times after the first visit. I’ve been in the room when he does it. “Nancy, I’m so sorry to call you again on this … yes, I know, sorry, sorry … right, this is the last time … right, really sorry … but I just want to make SURE I know what that moment was like.” And an hour later, Nancy will finally get to hang up.
Read it and be rewarded with all the detail. With that kind of inexhaustible reporting, he doesn’t need quotes. He can show you. He can plop you down right there, in East Harlem, in 1952, on a sweltering day “up on the roof with Uncle Duffy’s pigeons … playing checkers and eating linguini with red sauce bare-chested.”
Read it and notice how luxuriously he treats you. The blocks of writing are short, the narration is constantly broken up, the time shifted, the scenes changed, the pace furious. You are swept along as if in rushing rapids and Gary has the only paddle and you are happy. You’re in that wonderful place that reading so rarely gives you, hoping it never ends.
Read it and tell me if you can find a single sentence that doesn’t absolutely have to be there. Gary and I and bottles of Zinfandel have ruminated on good writing for hours at a time. But the thing that matters to him the most — and is the most exhausting — is ridding his pieces of every sentence that isn’t essential, no matter how tenderly he loved it. That’s why it takes him two months to finish most of his pieces. That’s why he cocoons himself in his attic in Charleston. That’s why his wife Sally doesn’t see him for days at a time. That’s why, when he comes out, at last, he looks rumpled and bleary and confused, like a man who’s been locked in a hot box. Wait, what day is it?
Deadspin’s Alan Siegel:
In June 2005, I accepted a job as a sports reporter at the Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence, Mass., and spent the next four years searching for soft-focus feature ideas. Something like Smith’s “Someone To Lean On,” the first story of his I ever read, a seven-page ode to a mentally disabled man named Radio that was full of warmth and pathos and never succumbed to the hideous manipulations and indulgences of so much feel-good longform writing.
When I actually found suitable material, I dug in, but never quite deep enough. In 2006, I wrote about Gwynette Proctor, a nun who coached a local high school basketball team. . . .My take was decent, I suppose, but it could’ve been better. Smith told me so in an email.
One critique today is an old song you’re sick of. But your writing will take another jump if you are harder on yourself in regard to paragraphs like these: Sister Murphy calls Sister Proctor “a very outgoing, committed Sister of Notre Dame. She loves the mission; she loves what she’s doing.”
If you can’t make the reader FEEL—in your descriptions of Sister Proctor in action, her intensity, her shouts to her team, her attention to detail—that this nun is “a very outgoing, committed sister” and that “she loves what she’s doing”— without having to quote someone as saying it, well then…
Just keep asking yourself, every time you’re tempted to run a weak-a*s quote, who’s the writer here? Who’s getting paid to tell a powerful tale? You or Sister Murphy? If it’s Sister Murphy, she’s got to do better than that.
And so did I. In my first few years out of college, I was excited by the idea of narrative journalism. But I didn’t quite understand how it worked. I assumed that a quirky subject was enough. I spent only three or four hours reporting the Sister Proctor story, so I was forced to use boring quotes to spackle over the cracks. The profile fell a little flat, never overcoming its inherent sappiness. Smith, who by all accounts would spend weeks, sometimes months, interviewing his subjects, knew this better than most.
Ask yourself hard questions: Why do I do that? I mean, REALLY why? Is it because it’s faster to write a story that way, and you were on deadline, out of time? OK, maybe, under the gun, now and then, you let yourself off the hook for that. Is it out of guilt? Do you feel that when you interview someone, you owe it to them to run a quote and get their name in the story? Not a good reason. If that’s it, it’s time to address the root of your guilt. Is it because you don’t trust your own writing ability to show those qualities in your main character, in action, rather than trotting someone else out to weakly say those things about her or him?
. . . And as was my habit, I used too many weak-a*s quotes. Smith rightfully mentioned that in his notes. “That was a comfortable read,” he began, and notice right away how careful he was with his criticism, how gently he framed it. He went on:
Here’s what I’d urge you to do: Push yourself harder. Don’t settle for writing sentences that are half yours and half somebody else’s quote. Such as:
As a kid, he says he had to “grab any attention at all,” which in high school, made him the perfect class clown.
Think about trying to go back to the people you interview with follow-up questions that give you real examples of how someone “grabs any attention at all” or is a class clown, so then you can show that in a specific way rather than just saying it. That has much more power, giving people a specific image of a kid doing something crazy to grab attention. Then show it in YOUR words, not in THEIR words.
For sportswriters listing their favorite Gary Smith story, go here. To get 20 of his best stories in print, go here. And here’s a tribute to Smith.
