Tam Harbert

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a week. Really. Then I told myself, “hey, it’s August. Everybody’s on vacation. It’s not like the six people who read my blog are going to actually miss it.”

I put off starting a blog for a long time. I knew once I started I’d have to post regularly. At least that’s what all the experts say. And I knew my habits well enough to understand what that would mean. Without an editor setting a deadline, I expend tremendous amounts of emotional energy just to psych myself into sitting down and writing.

Even with an editor imposing a deadline, my procrastination tendencies often back me into a corner when it comes time to file a story. I love to report, conduct research and interview people. I also love to write. But there is this strange no-man’s land in between those two activities, where my brain acts like a seven-year-old with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Unless I’ve got a brilliant idea for a post, or the results of my reporting have yielded a fantastic story that I just can’t wait to tell, anything and everything becomes a diversion. Suddenly, I must:

- Run out for Starbucks. I don’t even like Starbucks.
- Walk the dog, even though I have to wake him up to do it.
- Bathe the dog. Ditto.
- Check my social networks. Facebook alone is good for killing at least an hour.
- Check how the stock market is doing. As if it makes any difference to my pathetic nest egg.
- Search freelance sites for job opportunities. I can always justify the time spent as “marketing.”
- Call former editors and colleagues. Ditto.
- Research some obscure question on the Internet. Did you know that Mozart’s full baptismal name was Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart?
- Perform routine computer maintenance, including deleting thousands of e-mail messages, running security scans and updating software.
- Make personal appointments. Hair cuts. Dental appointments. Don’t I deserve a massage this week?

My personal favorite: Making lists of what I’m going to do on each of the next few days. This makes me feel tremendously productive.

While these things keep me busy, they don’t divert my brain much. I think a lot about what I’m going to write. I compose the article in my head. I like to say that the entire piece is all completed, all that’s left is the mechanics of getting it down on paper. Hell, Mozart did it. “Everything has been composed, just not written down,” he once told his nagging father.

Problem is, I’m not Mozart. And even if I were, that “writing down” part takes a long time, even with a computer. I’d better get started.

Too bad it’s time for my pedicure . . .

My freelance writing usually falls into one of two categories: straight journalism and custom publishing. Over the last year, as journalism and independent publishing suffers the extinction of the dead-tree business model and desperately searches for digital models that can replace it, custom publishing has become a much larger part of my business.

Custom publishing – producing articles, newsletters and magazines for a corporation or organization – is a form of marketing. As such, the goal of the writing is usually to get someone to buy something. Even the high-brow, glossy custom magazines that publish in-depth articles aimed at top-level executives are selling something. The goal of these magazines is often “thought leadership,” a vague marketing term that means the company is promoting how smart it is. They are trying to get the reader to buy into the image of the leaders of this corporation as particularly intelligent, insightful and strategic thinkers.

Such phrases have started creeping into my vocabulary as I do more custom work. I’ve always been a stickler with myself, and with others whom I edit, about keeping language simple, clear and concise. While many marketers value good writing, some do not. They – and the executives above them – apparently think imprecise, vague language effectively promotes their product or advances their agenda. Granted, the goal is to sell something, to in some way influence the reader’s behavior, but to do that you need to hook readers – by entertaining them, piquing their curiosity or delivering valuable information. Marketing people often think in terms of what they, and their company, want to say, rather than what the reader – their customer – needs. I try to point out to them that few people will actually read their custom magazine or corporate white paper unless it’s interesting, well-written or useful – and preferably all three. And those that do read it aren’t likely to take action if they get the sense that the article is just promoting the company.

But the marketing folks sign the checks. My job is to write what they want in the way they want it. So I cringe, subvert my hard-earned skills and write how I’m told. I write about challenges, rather than problems. There are no products or services – they are all solutions. Some are even, God forbid, unique solutions. And these solutions are often optimized, a word that runs all too rampant in marketing copy. (To optimize is to “make as effective, perfect or useful as possible.” If you have to optimize a product, that implies it wasn’t very effective or useful to start with.) All the while I imagine my notoriously loud and dictatorial journalism professor, John Bremner, rolling over in his grave and screaming “barbarisms!” (Yes, that word applies to writing. According to Dictionary.com, definition #3: “the use in a language of forms or constructions felt by some to be undesirably alien to the established standards of the language.”)

I know I shouldn’t complain. After all, in a strict business sense, my goal is to please my customer. Still, it gives me a stomach ache to write this way. And that’s not all. Like a fungus in a dark room, these marketing phrases and meaningless executive pronouncements proliferate and sneak into my journalism. It doesn’t help that I often interview marketing people, as well as executives, for my stories, and thus am exposed to these phrases on several fronts.

How to combat this? One of the best antidotes I’ve found is editing work. In college, Bremner seared so many editing commandments into my brain that I somehow channel him when I edit other’s work. My ability to sniff out the inexact phrase or dangling participle becomes keener when I read someone else’s copy. When I don’t have others to edit, I try to bifurcate my personality. I’ll write a draft of something, let it sit for a day, and then come back to it with my merciless Bremner persona, red pen ready to slash.

The other method is to really listen and think when I interview people. Even journalists – who are professional listeners as well as writers – sometimes get lazy as they take in the answers to their questions. I try to remember to ask, at least once during any given interview, some version of the question: “What the hell does that mean?” More diplomatically than that, of course. For example, the other day a CIO was explaining to me a strategic move that his company made. “They were charged to come back with a change in communication initiatives to drive better alignment for not only the IT organization, but also drive better alignment for the enterprise.” I was able to partially translate as: “I asked them to tell me how .. .” but I had no idea what he meant by better alignment. So I asked. His answer got into important details that enabled me to write a much more interesting and useful story for the reader.

Whether the reader is a magazine subscriber or a customer, that should always be the goal.

Story structure is one of the most difficult aspects of journalistic writing. It’s also the most important. After all, structure is what makes a story, a story. Sometimes when a story’s hard to edit and I can’t figure out why, it eventually dawns on me that it has a bad structure, or no structure at all. The writer may have good information, great sources, proper spelling and grammar, and solid writing, but without a good structure the reader (and the editor) finds the story unsatisfying. It’s like the writer is handing you a box full of puzzle pieces, rather than fitting them together to show you the picture.

I’ve found that the most time-consuming and painful way to write a story is to dive in without a structure in mind. I may ultimately decide it’s not the right structure, but I have to start with some kind of structure. If I just start lifting from my notes, trying to string facts and quotes together in a serial process, there is no engine to drive the story and no digestion of the material to deliver analysis or fresh insight to the reader. As James W. Michaels, former editor of Forbes magazine, once said in critiquing a writer’s story: “This is not reporting, it’s stenography!”

Sometimes the structure is obvious. A story that documents someone’s life or a particular incident, for example, usually uses time as its structure. It starts at the beginning and ends at the end. Even then, however, it can be more interesting to tell the story out of sequence. Maybe starting at the end and interspersing flashbacks would be more compelling, for instance.

But many stories don’t have a beginning or end. I may write about a federal policy or regulatory issue and its impact on the technology industry. Or perhaps I’m covering a hot technology and trying to assess how it will develop, what products are likely and what companies might dominate the emerging market. In a policy story, I can present the arguments for and against. But that’s predictable, boring and delivers little value to the reader. For a technology or market, I can explain the factors behind it, say where it is now and report predictions from various industry luminaries. Ditto.

What helps me find a structure – especially with particularly complex stories with lots of sources – is deciding which story I want to tell. After all, from any given set of facts and interviews, many different stories could be told. So after I’ve finished all my reporting, I let it percolate in the back of my mind while I go do something else. When I’m ready to write, but before I review my notes, I start playing with a story map. I randomly jot down the ideas and facts that I remember most clearly from my research and reporting. Sometimes certain quotes still ring in my ears. Then I try to group the facts and quotes that relate to particular ideas. These are my main building blocks. But they still aren’t connected. However, after distilling the information a picture often starts to emerge. I reach a conclusion – based on who my reader is, the type of publication I’m writing for and my own judgment – about what is the most valuable story to tell.

Once I know what I’m trying to give to the reader, I can figure out the best way to do it. Hopefully the result is a puzzle solved – a deeper understanding of an issue or event – rather than just a jumble of facts and commentary.