11/16/2014

On Writing | mitchalbom.com

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M i t c h ' s T r u n k | I n t h e W o r k s | F A Q s A b o u t M i t c h | L e t t e r F r o m a Y o u n g F a n | M i t c h ' s C a l e n d a r | T h e O f f i c e

ON WRITING

An excerpt from a talk that sports columnist Mitch Albom gave to fellow staffers
at the Detroit Free Press in 2001.

INSPIRATION PAGES

Read notes from Mitch about what inspired him

to write each of his books:

What I hope to do is talk a little bit about some ideas I have learned over the past 20 years in
journalism.
One thing I have learned from being in the radio, television and newspaper worlds and
therefore working for all the competition simultaneously - is that we, in the print world, are
not what we used to be. We are not the primary source of information for people any more. I
think we're all painfully aware of that. By the time the newspaper arrives on the porch, most
people -- if they've watched CNN or listened to the radio -- already have a very good idea of
what is going on. They already have the who-what-where-when and why they teach us about
in journalism school.
What this has engendered in the newspaper world is a need to approach writing and our
journalism from a different point of view; we have to arrest the readers' attention. We are
not just the paper of record anymore. We are not just there to give you the who-what-whenwhere-and-why. They're doing that on the Internet, they're doing it on television, they're
doing it on 24-hour cable news, they're doing it on radio. So what do we have to offer that
none of them can?
The only thing that we have to offer is our ability to write. We're way better writers than
anybody working in these other organizations, and I can tell you that because I work in all of
them. There's nobody there that can do what the people at this newspaper are capable of
doing in terms of writing style. So when we mimic what they do, we lose, because they're
faster than us. When we do what we do best, which is stylize, write, detail, flow, extrapolate,
then we win, because they can never do that. They don't have the manpower, they don't have
the experience. So I want to talk about a couple of ways that I think you can arrest people's
attention.
And I do mean arrest. I don't use that verb lightly. Because people will give you about two to
three seconds now, on anything. At MSNBC, they rate by the minute. They'll give us ratings,
and they'll say between 11 and 12 minutes after the hour, you really had their attention.
That's how they rate it. That's the kind of attention span they're fighting with, and that's
what we are fighting with, too, whether we want to admit it or not.
So I'm going to break down three elements of stylistic writing, and I have to say from the
start that this is more for feature writing than it is necessarily for straight news stories. I
think straight news stories still have to be governed first and foremost by the who-whatwhere-when and why. All those things you are taught in basic journalism school I still think
primarily hold, although I still think there's plenty of room for style within that. I'm going to
break it down to 1) leads, 2) the middle 3) the overall idea and 4) the end, and just give you
some of my thoughts as to what works and what doesn't.
LEADS
Let's talk about leads. The way that we're taught in journalism school to do a lead is to get all
the basic information into the first or second paragraph somehow. Well, as you all know, if
you're trying to do that, it's hard to do with any style. You've got to say how old somebody is,
where they live, what they did, what they're charged with, all the rest of it, it's hard to put a
lot of pizzazz on that and make it look like anything.
I'm not sure you have to do that. I think that as long as you hold the reader's attention until
you get to that information, it's all right to bury it a little further down. And I know that that

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A LETTER FROM A YOUNG FAN

I receive thousands of emails

each month from people of all
ages. Many, like the young
student whose note appears below,

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again is a violation of an old axiom, burying the lead. In features and in columns, I don't
believe that's true. Let me give you a couple of examples.
First of all, there's something that I refer to as misdirection. Those of you that follow magic
know they make you look over here, and meanwhile they're doing something over there.
There's the same kind of thing in writing. I'll read you an example. This is Jimmy Breslin's
column, that I always thought was a terrific one, and it's from I think the '70s. It starts off
with something that I always think is an effective way to begin, which is a scene, an actual
scene that is taking place. People love to be dropped in to something. We're a movie culture.
We like to see scenes play out in front of us. So when in doubt, always paint a picture with a
scene to start anything, any story, any lead, any feature story, whatever. Better to start it
with a scene than a declarative sentence.
They were walking along in the empty gray afternoon, three of them, Alan Burnett, Aaron
Friedman and Billy Mavery. Burnett, the eldest at 17, walking up Bedford Avenue in
Brooklyn, and singing out Mohammed Ali rhymes into the chilly air. As they reached the
corner of Costco Street, it was Alan Burnett's turn to give his Ali rhyme: "AJB is the latest,
and he's the greatest." "Who's AJB?" one of them said. "Alan J. Burnett," he said. They were
laughing and they turned the corner onto Costco Street. The three wore coats against the
cold.

ask me what inspired my work.

Ive included Ryans questions,
and my replies, which I hope my
readers and other students and
teachers will find helpful.
To: Mitch Albom
From: Ryan K.

Dear Mr. Albom,
My name is Ryan and I am in the
seventh grade.
read full letter & mitch's response

Burnett was in a brown trench coat, Friedman a burgundy leather and Mavery a beige
corduroy with a box collar. A white paint stain was on the bottom of the back of Mavery's
coat. Mavery walking on the outside, suddenly was shoved forward.
"Keep on walking straight," somebody behind him said. Billy Mavery turned his head.
Behind him was this little guy of maybe 18, wearing red sweater, dark pants and black
gun.
Aaron Friedman, walking beside Mavery, says he saw two others besides the gunman. The
three boys kept walking, although Mavery thought the guy in the red sweater had a play
gun.
"Give me the money."
"I don't have any money," Alan Burnett said.
The guy with the gun shot Alan Burnett in the back of the head.
Burnett pitched into the wall of an apartment house and went down on his back, dead.
The gunman stood with Alan Burnett's body at his feet and said now he wanted coats. Billy
Mavery handed back the corduroy with the paint stain. Friedman took off his burgundy
leather. The gunman told the two boys to start running. "Don't look back!" Billy Mavery
and Aaron Friedman ran up Costco Street past charred buildings, with tin nailed over the
windows, expecting to be shot in the back. People came onto the street and the guy in the
red sweater waved his gun at them. The people dived into doorways. He stuck the gun into
his belt and he ran up Bedford Avenue, ran away with the new coats.
Some saw one guy, some saw somebody else, others say they saw two. It was another of
last week's murders that went almost unnoticed. Alan Burnett was young, people in the
city were concentrating all week on the murders of elderly people. Next week we can dwell
on murders of the young, and then the killing of the old won't seem as important.
That is a third of the column. To me the nut graph, if you apply the old way of looking at
this - and remember this was written in the '70s the nut graph is basically, "It was another
of last week's murders that went almost unnoticed," the last paragraph that I read. You
didn't get to that until a third of the way through the column. He goes later in the column
into statistics and how many young people are dying and the rest of it. What was important
was that he started with a scene of happy go-lucky kids walking down the street, and then I
thought the most effective thing he did was: "He said, give me the money."
"I don't have any money."
The guy with the gun shot Alan Burnett in the back of the head.A sentence. That's it. one
sentence. But it's horrifying, because you've got this little misdirection going on. You've got
this scene of these kids walking down the street, they're having a good time. All of a sudden,
somebody shoves them, and then this simple sentence: "Give me the money." "I don't have
any money." Bang! That's what's supposed to stay with you. But it doesn't happen until the
sixth or seventh paragraph.
Now you could say, by the traditional school of journalism, why did you waste two or three
paragraphs talking about what they were singing as they walked down the street? Because
you establish the innocence of childhood. When kids are walking down the street and
singing Muhammad Ali rhymes, you paint the picture of innocence here and - boom, it's
over.

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Now, I think people will read all the way through that. Old school might say that you have to
have the fact that a 17-year-old was shot in the head somewhere in the first or second
paragraph. I don't think so. Not today. I think, first paint a picture that will draw people in.
That's what I call a little example of misdirection.
Here's something I wrote that's the opposite of that. This uses a lead that gets as much
information into the opening as I could because I knew I was going to need it later on, but I
didn't want to bore people. I didn't want to say, this happened, then this happened, then this
happened, then this happened, then this happened, then this happened, who-what-wherewhen and why. So I did it this way. This is a story about Justin Mello, the kid who was killed
in New Baltimore.
One night, one town, one bullet, one kid.
The kid was Justin Mello, barely 16 years old, popular soccer player at Anchor Bay High
School, with a melting smile, a tall athletic frame, a freshly minted driver's license and a
dream of buying his father's GMC truck with the money earned working at a pizza shop.
The bullet came from a 9-mm handgun that was fired just inches from Mello's head as he
knelt, execution style, in a cooler filled with dough and cheese. The bullet ripped through
Mello's skull and exited his forehead. When they found his body, he was still on his knees.
The town was New Baltimore, population 7,000, a quiet waterfront community in
Macomb County where there hadn't been a murder since before Justin was born.
The night was Saturday, October 21st. Before this, sighs a lawyer in the case, the biggest
problem in New Baltimore was the fish flies. Not any more.
Now that's five paragraphs. That is not a misdirection lead. That is quite the opposite. That
is, I'm going to get a ton of information into these first five paragraphs, but I'm going to try
to do it in a way that doesn't put people to sleep. So I did the establishing sentence, which
was "One night, one bullet, one town, one kid." It ended up being a theme that I kept coming
back to over and over again. But it's a gimmick. I'm going to be the first person to tell you
that. It's a gimmick in that it gets people to go along in that I have an opening sentence that
says, "One night, one bullet, one town, one kid." Well, don't you after reading that sentence,
want to know what kid, what night, what bullet, what town?
In four paragraphs, I'm able to tell you that the kid was 16, he was an athlete, that he
dreamed of buying his father's truck, that he was killed by a 9-mm handgun, that it was fired
a couple inches from his head, in a cooler, execution style, that the town of New Baltimore
had 7,000 people in it, that there hadn't been a murder in it since before Justin was born,
which means 17 years, and that the night was Oct. 21. That's a lot of information to get into
the first few grafs. I did my duty as a journalist. But hopefully, if I did my job as a writer, I
didn't just put you to sleep with a bunch of facts. I laid it out with this picture of the bullet,
the town.
And what I did after that is, I came back to:
One bullet. Follow its flight and you witness a devastation that far exceeds its caliber. A
swath that cuts a community in two. You see children weeping and parents dumb with
grief. You see a soccer team wearing armbands and a makeshift tombstone on a high
school lawn. You see accused murderers in chains being cheered outside a courthouse. You
see witnesses changing their stories. You see a Christmas tree in a suburban home devoid
of presents for the oldest boy. You see a father in a hospital as a yellow body bag is
unzipped. He looks at the face that used to be so bright, used to be his son, and is forever
shattered by the hole of one bullet.
Again, it's a gimmick. I used three paragraphs there to set up the whole scene of what
happened in this town and what you are about to see in this 900-inch story, because 900inch stories scare people. I know that my job as a writer, and moreso as a journalist, because
there is a difference in book writing vs. this, is that I have to ease the pain of what's about to
come here for the reader. So by laying out those next paragraphs, what I did was like a movie
preview. In one minute they give you all these scenes from all throughout the movie and you
have a general pace of what's coming up.
I use those paragraphs to kind of say, this is what's coming up. You're going to see children
weeping and parents dumb with grief. You're going to see a soccer team wearing armbands.
You're going to see people in chains being jeered outside a courthouse. You're going to see a
Christmas tree scene and a family that's rife with grief.
And then throughout the course of the story, all those things are presented in much more
detail. But this is the challenge for a longer piece: how do you get something in the lead that
doesn't put people to sleep and doesn't start in one area and go straight through until you've
covered it all? So try to step back and understand that it's very important to arrest the
reader's attention, somehow, some way. You can do it with deflection, like Jimmy Breslin
did on his story, you can do it straight ahead with information, but if you're going to do that,
see if you can come up with some gimmick or some visual. Follow the path of a bullet that
goes through this and goes through that. It'll hold the reader's attention that much longer.

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MIDDLES
Some of the most effective ways I have seen newspapers deal with stories is to look beyond
what is apparent in front of you. See if you can tell the story through a side angle. What I
mean by that is, when President Kennedy was assassinated, there were columnists all across
the nation that wrote what a tragic day this was for America. It's the easiest piece of
journalism you can think of, right? How hard is that? Every columnist in America is going to
sit down at his typewriter and write, what a tragic day this is for America. Good. Serviceable.
Not that original, and not that arresting.
In 1963, you don't have much alternative. But if it happened in the year 2001, can you
imagine what CNN, MSNBC, Fox, all-news radio, the Internet? By the time the newspaper
comes out, what is going to be left? They'll have these wonderful images of the president,
he's been assassinated, his whole life story, his children, they'll be doing things that we can't
do if you're just going to sit down and talk about what a tragic day this is for America. The
best handling of the Kennedy assassination column, and I've read plenty of them, was also
done by Jimmy Breslin. He went out to the cemetery and interviewed the guy who was
digging the grave for President Kennedy. He was the only guy to think of this. His whole
column was just about how this guy was digging this dirt up and how he was trying to make
the hole really perfect because this was a really special grave. Through the eyes of this lowly
grave digger, whose only connection to Kennedy was the fact that he was digging the hole in
the ground in which he was going to be placed, he captured the heartbreak of the country
way better -- way better -- than the hundreds of other columnists who wanted to write that
big sweeping broad statement. He went and found a person, and through the eyes of that
one particular person, told a story for everyone.
I don't think until the very end paragraph did he even mention that Kennedy had been
assassinated. He told the whole thing just like, he moves the dirt around, he says this has to
be a perfect hole, "I'm going to push some dirt around here, I've dug lots of other holes in my
life, but I've never done one like this." He talks about who he was as an American. It was a
great way to deal with a story like that, and something only newspapers and their writers
would be able to come up with.
I remember a far less significant example, something I did one time with basketball player
Dennis Rodman, who was holding out for more money. Whatever it was they were offering
him at the time, it seemed like a ton of money and it wasn't enough for him. I went to an
auto plant and interviewed a series of people about what they made and what they did and
barely mentioned Dennis Rodman, except at the end. I described what they did, and what
their jobs were, what their tasks were, how often they worked, and then asked them, what do
you think about the fact that Dennis Rodman can't get by on $10 million a year or whatever
it was.
I was able to capture a lot of the feeling of what people were feeling toward Dennis Rodman
at that moment. I could have sat down and written one of those what's the matter with
today's rich athletes? columns, which is done all the time. But that's hardly original either.
They're hearing that on CNN and ESPN and all the rest of them. But to go out and actually
tell his story through somebody else misdirects you again. That old Houdini thing is a great
way to bring home what people really feel about it.
ENDINGS
One of the mistakes people make in wrapping stories up is that they think that they have to
have a huge declarative ending. A big, Ta-da! I think that sometimes, the more subtle the
ending, the better. One of the greatest endings I ever saw for a column was one that Mike
Royko wrote back when he was in Chicago and it had to do with a guy who snatched chains
from people. That was what he did. He snatched their chains and then he moved from chain
snatching on to worse crimes and other things and he had been accused of rape. In this rape
trial, and this woman was clear that this was the guy who had raped her, the lawyer's defense
was that this guy had had a chain stitched into his private parts. They put the woman on the
stand and said, describe his private parts. If you've been raped by him, you ought to know
what it was. She tried to describe it as best she could, but obviously she was too traumatized
by the rape. And then what happened was, they put the guy on the stand, and they had him
drop his pants, and show that he had this little gold chain there. And the lawyer said, how
could anyone miss that? Clearly she has the wrong guy. Even though all the evidence,
everything, showed that this was the right guy.
But because this woman didn't notice this little chain, they set him free. So, Mike Royko
spent the whole column just telling the story and when he has two paragraphs left to go. The
first thing he says is, there's very little that anybody can do about it now, about this guy
getting off. However, it is chain-snatching season. So I suggest that if anyone should ever get
an opportunity to see whatever his name was again in the buff, maybe they want to grab that
chain and run with it. End of column.
It's a great ending, right? It's a great ending. But you got everything you needed in terms of
his opinion in that last single line. But he spent the whole rest of the thing setting it up. So
that's one way you can end a piece. There was one I wrote about a good kid who got shot
accidentally and died. You can make big sweeping statements, or you can just sort of end it

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with a scene. I had it ended with the mother, who was sitting at the house, and it's around
Christmastime, and these are the last couple of paragraphs.
In the tidy house on Fielding Street, a block where everyone knows everyone else and
where everyone liked her son, Annette Towns has only a scrapbook of pictures to hug and
kiss. "Not too long ago, I had a dream about Daryl," she says, forcing a smile. "He came
to me said, Momma don't worry. I'm okay. I'm always home. But that's the thing. He
was already home. He was shot in his home. He was already home. He was following her
rules. He was doing the right thing. If they could all be like that, we say. But Daryl Towns
was like that, and it couldn't save him. And today, at the end of the century, because we
can't control our children, our tempers or our guns, there is a Christmas wreath hanging
on a tombstone, and another piece of our city's future is buried beneath it.
That's a strong ending too. You don't need to come out and say, what's the matter with our
society, we need to stop this now. You just paint a picture at the end, just as you do with the
beginning, and let it resonate. I always try to liken good writing - the stuff that I read that I
look at and put it down and say wow - is like dropping a stone or throwing a stone in a
calm lake. The really good part of the writing is all the ripples that come as a result of it. The
stone is the paragraph, the ripples are the way that it resonates. Even the way that you laugh
when I said, you know, pull his chain, it's resonating after you're done reading it. It's playing
in your mind. Well, you can do that with humor, you can do that with images, and I think
sometimes that we make mistakes because we're trained to not leave anything unsaid.
Sometimes it's what's left unsaid that resonates more with the reader. When I wrote the
book "Tuesdays with Morrie," the one overriding thing that I worked with the editor at
Doubleday on was raking it and raking it and raking it of emotion. You look at that book,
and it's an emotional book, right? Our only directive was to rake it of emotion. Why?
Because the emotion's built in. And if I spent time saying, "isn't it sad about the poor old
man who's dying," it's too much. You can't handle it.
The best writing just lets it sit there. Trust your readers, they're pretty smart. They know
how to read, they're already ahead of most of the rest of the country. And they'll get it, they'll
get what you're trying to say. It'll resonate with them, particularly at ends of stories. And in
leads. If you're really good, and you have really good powers of observation, you will see and
you will describe. Always look for something in the room, or something that somebody says
or something, that does your work for you. Instead of you saying, this is terrible, this is sad,
this is awful, look for a picture that tells it better than you and just describe the picture.
That's what we can do as journalists and writers that nobody else can.

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