Charles Kuralt  On Writing


NEVER WRITE A SENTENCE THAT FIGHTS THE PICTURE

Alice Wield, who was a writer for the old "Douglas-Edward with the News," the principal evening newscast at CBS during those old days, told me — I don't know where she learned it, but television news was just being born then — that you must never write a sentence that fights the picture. The picture is so strong, she believed, and I believed, that if you're conveying some information that is not in tune with the picture that's on the screen, the viewer's going to be watching the picture and miss entirely what you're saying. It's always possible to fashion a sentence, it seems to me, so that it complements rather than struggles with the picture.

GOOD WRITING IS RARE

Well, ideally, they shouldn't notice the writing at all, in my opinion. If you end up saying, "My, that was a well-written story," the writer really hasn't done his job. It should be an experience, the picture and the words, and neither the picture nor the words, ideally, should call attention to themselves. Or so I think. I don't know, I think that writing is the skill that's most in demand in broadcast news today. There are many young men and women who are able to sit down and credibly say, "Good evening, here is the news," from an anchor desk, and people who know the techniques of shooting tape, and editing and producing. But the writer is getting to be sort of a rare bird. When we find a young writer around here, people whisper behind him in the halls, "He's a writer, you know." Such a rare breed today. I suppose television has to share some of the blame for that, many young people are growing up not reading as much as we used to. And I'm certain that good writing comes from good reading. I think good writing is derivative. I know that when I sit down to write, I can hear the rhythms of good writers in my head. Sometimes I can even tell you which writer's rhythms I'm listening to as I write a piece. And so probably the way to train oneself to be a writer is to do just an awful lot of reading. And eclectic reading, at that. I don't think it has to all be Dante or Shakespeare. I think one should read as widely as possible in order to get lots of different rhythms to pound away in the head as you sit down to the word processor.

TV WRITING

Well, unfortunately, I don't think about it much. So it's hard for me to formulate a rule. You certainly try to avoid the passive voice. You try to provide short, active sentences. I try to keep my writing as simple as I can. Just plain old declarative sentences seem to serve best in this field. If you went on the air with a television news script akin, say, to George Will's writing in a newspaper column, it wouldn't work very well. At least it wouldn't work to my taste. I think that good television writing is simple. It can be affecting, I don't mean that it has to be without feeling or without emotion, without a point of view, which is okay in feature writing. But it shouldn't ever be scholarly sounding or complicated.

FEATURE WRITING

Yeah, I learned early that I loved features. Most young writers do, I think. Because it gives you a chance to show off a little bit, rather than just write those straight news stories interminably. Another thing about features is that they're easier to do. If you're covering a presidential campaign, there are 50 or 75 or 100 other reporters on the story. I've never liked the competitiveness of it. I've never liked the deadline pressure. My idea of a story very quickly became one which nobody was covering but me. And you can take your time with a story like that. "On the Road," all those 25 years or more, if we ever picked a story and found some other reporter was also working on it, why, we just skipped it and went on to the next thing, because it seems like too much of a media event if it was being covered by even one other person. It is more fun, in my view, to be a feature writer. Some reporters, however, never really enjoy it. I remember Roger Mudd one time teasing me about how I never cover anything significant. Never covered anything important. Roger was and is the great reporter of the Congress; he knows more about the Senate and the House than anybody else I know. And always loved it. And always covered important events, because after all, that's where the nation's laws are made. And he never did understand my preference for, you know, a fellow in Indiana who could hold more eggs in his hand than anybody else, or those sort of insignificant, unimportant stories. But I loved it. I still prefer that kind of story.

INVERTED PYRAMID: BRING ON THE BEAR

I never studied journalism, as I say, but I used to know an old editor, whose advice was, "Bring on the bear," meaning when you're writing a story, for heaven's sake, get right to it; give us in the first few words the essence of what it is you're going to write about. Parentheses, later I wrote a book about a North Pole expedition I went on, and I was able to start a chapter, "Polar Bear!" And I sent it to old Phillips Russell, that editor. I said "How's this for bringing on the bear?" But of course, I knew what he meant, and I think it's still pretty good advice. Sometimes you can begin a story that way, just with a few words that tell the viewer what the story is before you go on with the details.

I have given equal attention to the last paragraph and the last sentence. The first one's important, but I suppose really, I have thought, the way the story ends, which is the thought or feeling the viewer's going to take away with him, is just as important. It was frustrating working for The Charlotte News, because, you know, in the old time on the newspaper, they would cut from the bottom. Sometimes you'd see your well-thought-out last paragraph cut off. But in feature writing that doesn't occur, I guess.

LEADS WITH VARIETY

I suppose that I consciously set for variety in the lead. Sometimes I would use a quote. Sometimes it's very effective to start the story with the subject of it talking, saying one particularly interesting or pithy or powerful thing. That serves very often to draw the viewer into the story, I suppose. Sometimes I would start with a simile or a metaphor or sometimes I would start with a question. Ever wonder how bricks were made? Well, this is one way, the way they do it in this brick factory, here's another older way, a man with a mule mill stirring up the mud, making the bricks by hand. Very often, I would say usually when working on a story, somewhere along the story I would see something or hear something that I knew was going to be the lead. That would be the way to start it, wouldn't it. I was always looking for a lead while working on the story.