I’m writing about a story I’m writing.
6 June 2022
COSTA MESA, Calif.—I created this newspaper so I could write about what I wanted to write about. It was an act of rebellion as much as it was an act of desperation, because as a journalist writing all the time for other places you often feel like you lose something essential when your words are for others and not for yourself.
I want to write about a story I’m writing for The New York Times, because writing is one way I can come to understand something I’m confused about. Writing is like having a conversation with the universe; your words spill onto the page and once there they look back up at you, silently speaking to you as if they now belong to someone else. The story I’m writing is a feature story, which means it’ll be longer than a news story — those 600-or-so-word things that give you the most important bits of a story first because nobody expects you to stick around for the ending, however well-written it may be.
A feature story is a prestigious thing. It’s a chance for you to be more of the writer you want to be, because you have more space to try the tricks that made you want to be a writer in the first place. Those tricks include things like finding and fleshing out characters that make you want to keep reading the story to the end, and they include setting. You aim to convey a sense of the place a story is happening in a way that no photo or video can.
This story is happening in many places, and I get to visit some of those places. The places I get to visit are in Los Angeles. Next week, I’ll visit the La Brea Tar Pits — pits of tar in downtown L.A. that preserve the remains of fossil plants and animals that used to live in southern California. I’ll also visit the L.A. River — a river buried alive by the pouring of concrete upon it.
The story is about how scientists are using fossils preserved at the tar pits to help inform re-greening efforts along the L.A. River. The title I’m toying with is “The Dead Speak — How Fossils Can Help Us Fix Our Broken Ecosystems.”
As a reporter, one question always burns in me: What is a story, anyway? And hotter than that: What’s a good story? I can think of a few stories I think are good, but whenever I try to dissect them to try to get at what’s good, I always come up short. It’s as if I’m trying to explain what individual parts of a piano make it a pleasant instrument, or which notes of a song make it a good song.
The thing for me that’s hardest in science reporting is something I once heard someone else describe as making and serving a sawdust sandwich. I write here about the feeling of reading, or eating, a sawdust sandwich:
“Your feet are on fire, and each step you take lights a new fire and your feet cry for you to stop and rest. They cry for you to stop, because all you’ve been thinking about is the first bite of the best sandwich in the universe made from the best bread that you bought at the bakery on the side of the country road near the ocean that morning. You knew then the bread was going to help you make the best-ever sandwich because the bread was warm and you could smell its made-with-love aroma wafting from your paper bag like an invisible hug. You’ve hiked for miles and you know that the bread and the sandwich will sing in your mouth and angels will lift you and you’ll hike another 100 miles if you have to. Just the thought of the bread gives you all the strength you need to hoist your one-ton backpack from your shoulders and let it fall to the ground like a bag of bricks. It thuds to the ground and you’re surprised that the bag didn’t break the rock it hit in two. You’ve kept the sandwich at the top of your backpack so it wouldn’t get squished, and when you fish it out it looks like the perfect deli sandwich that you made it to be that morning like an artist hunched over their easel putting their soul into each drop of paint that spills from their brush onto their canvas. The birds around you seem to be singing louder — they’re singing for you, you think, because they know what joy there is that’s about to come in to the world when you eat, and you take a bite, and the bread — yes, it’s as good as you thought it would be. Better, even. Not too soft. Not too crunchy. Somewhere in between; heaven. It sits right on that fine line between too crunchy and too soft, and it’s there that you know you’ll soon find the angels that will carry you as far as you need to go, but then — sawdust? You don’t know that it’s sawdust, not right away. But a look of doubt forms in your eyes, which are open now, and the birds grow silent, and when you pull the sandwich away from your mouth, you cough, and a cloud of flakes of what can only be sawdust puff out in front of you, and the spell of the bread vanishes. You didn’t think there would be sawdust in your sandwich — not this time. Not like the last time, when you realized that a sandwich could be like a symphony in your mouth if only you made it right — if only you hadn’t thought to spread a layer of sawdust on top of the roast beef and below the mayonnaise. And now you, person reading this, see what a footlong challenge it is writing about things that are very scientific and very technical for a non-scientific and non-technical audience. You know in your heart that when you hear someone speaking science-ese and they say ‘carbon dioxide concentrations will reach 420 parts per million in the atmosphere before long,’ that the sauce that exists just behind their wooden words is the sadness of losing a world where there will never again be a New Orleans with its jazz music that I love because it’ll have been swallowed by the sea. You know in your heart that when an astrophysicist tells you that some galaxies in the night sky make new stars hundreds of times the size of our sun every year, that the feeling behind their words is that the universe can make music that would make Mozart blush. But you need to tell the fact first before you can get to the Mozart. You can’t avoid it — you need to sprinkle on just a little sawdust before you can show your reader or listener that what tastes like sawdust is actually stardust.”
My intention for this story, and every story, really, is to avoid serving you sawdust. But if I have to serve it, I’ll try to serve it in a way that makes the idea of eating sawdust somehow seem like the next in thing to do. 