Motivation, Storytelling and Mid-Career: A Q&A with Jacqui Banaszynski

Yesterday Jacqui Banaszynski shared how persistence landed her three big stories. Today, she talks about the persistence of storytelling, finding the right motivation to stay persistent and how persistence might look different in mid-career than when you're just starting out. Banaszynski is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who now holds the Knight Chair in Editing at the Missouri School of Journalism and an Editing Fellow at the Poynter Institute. She worked in newsrooms for more than 30 years, and now leads workshops for journalists around the world.

Tomorrow, one more post from Jacqui about persistence vs. politeness.

What role does persistence play in storytelling? Do the two go together at all?

I’m tempted to say there is no storytelling without persistence. Sure, there are the rare right-place, right-time cases of a great story landing in a writer’s notebook. But even then, the writer has to be alert to the value of the story and has to pursue it to the end.

Pursuit takes persistence. Lots of it. Persistence and follow-through often mark the difference between the successful, published writer and the frustrated wanna-be, perhaps even more than talent.

A writer has to be persistent in developing and pitching an idea; she has to be open to shaping and reshaping it to sell, while retaining her belief in it even when others don’t see the potential.

A writer has to be persistent in gaining access to the right subjects and sources, and in getting those people to grant both time and honesty.

A writer has to be persistent in staying focused on the point and purpose of a story, resisting the inevitable distractions and detours that come with reporting. At some level, that means even working to stay interested in the topic, or to get interested in the topic in the first place, or to work through enough interview questions to find the subject’s passion for the topic.

Most writers have to exercise discipline that goes beyond mere persistence when they finally sit down to write. And rewrite. And rewrite again. Too many great stories fail because writers lost patience or energy at the keyboard.

And finally, a writer has to be persistent in getting a story published. That means everything from (politely) hounding editors to working with photographers and designers to reading final proofs (if allowed) to make sure all the pieces of a story package are in place and accurate. Hitting the send button is not the end of journalistic writing.

You told a story at the conference of a student who wanted to do a story on a girl with an eating disorder. You set the bar high, assuming she'd give up. But she didn't and it sounds like she came up with a great story. How do high standards and persistence play off each other to create a better writer? Or do they?

Different people respond to different challenges. Some are “I’ll show you” types who thrive in the face of an impossible challenge. Others fold under pressure, so need constant validation and encouragement.

As an editor and teacher, part of my job is to figure out what best motivates a writer. But if you’re a freelancer working on your own or with multiple editors, you need to take control of your own motivation, and take responsibility for the quality of your work and for your own growth and development. If you can’t rely on someone else to push, prod or pull you, what can you do to push, prod and pull yourself? That takes both persistence and self-awareness. It means keeping yourself engaged, managing your time and refusing to get discouraged when you get little or negative feedback.

I believe in the theory that most people will rise (or fall) to the expectations set for them by people they value. So can you set expectations for yourself — tangible goals you want to reach or bars you want to clear — and then work day-by-day to get there?

Even if your work is “good enough” for publication or other editors, is it good enough for you?

Years ago, I made a sort of bet with myself to see if I could be directly involved with at least one award-winning piece of journalism a year. It wasn’t the awards themselves that mattered as much as using them as a benchmark. It reminds me to pay attention to the work I’m involved in, and make sure I’m giving extra effort to projects that have the most potential.

For mid-career journalists, is the issue of persistence in their craft different than those just out of college, in your experience?

See the answer just above. The key is to take responsibility for your own development, to know yourself and to find ways to motivate yourself.

Early in life, in school and at home, most institutions and relationships exist to help a young person grow and learn and achieve. It’s almost taken for granted that a young person will get constantly better, and that there will be people all around them to help them. That can be true very early in careers, too, when young hires have mentors or bosses invested in their success.

But after a few years on the job, that responsibility shifts and individuals have to take ownership of their own growth. One of the hard adjustments to adulthood is to realize that learning doesn’t come in a steady rise, but often in short steps up after frustrating long plateaus. And taking those short steps up sometimes doesn’t happen unless you make it happen yourself. So you have to start setting goals and routes to achieve them. You have to reach out and ask for help or for opportunities rather than have then given to you. You have to want to keep learning, and find ways to do so.

Are you constantly reading about the craft, or finding courses to take — perhaps joining a writer’s group or taking some online courses through NewsU or at a local community college? Are you inviting a publication's editor for coffee and asking her to evaluate your work? Are you finding writers who you admire, studying their work and perhaps interviewing them about their struggles and techniques?

And, most important, are you paying attention to how much your work grows and improves over time by reading past work?

Writing is a lot like running a marathon, or going on a long, arduous backpacking trip. You will cruise sometimes and stumble at others. You can’t get anywhere except one step at a time. So you need to set your sights on small markers along the way to the finish line, and celebrate when you cross one of those markers.

Then you need to start moving towards the next, one step at a time.

What do you tell mid-career journalists about their craft--improving it, etc?

Again, see the answer above. Improving the craft (and art) of reporting and writing and editing means constantly reporting and writing and editing — and reading. It means being in the world, talking to people, asking questions, paying attention, constantly keeping your curiosity on high and looking for stories.

It means reading with a writer’s mind, and at some level studying how good writers write. It also means getting back in touch with grade school grammar and gaining a better understanding of the habits you have in use of language, and of the effects specific language use (and grammar, punctuation, etc.) have on an overall piece.

It means writing, a lot, and then re-reading your work (out loud) with a reader’s mind:

• What’s clear?
• What’s fuzzy?
• What images stand out?
• What background can be condensed?
• What words or passages are self-indulgent and decorative rather than telling and descriptive?

It means trying something new and taking a few risks, as a reporter, a writer and a reader.

Anything else I didn't ask that you want to add or think is important to say on persistence for journalists?

Journalism is work worth doing. No matter what is happening in the news industry economically, the work of storytellers is work essential to society. It feeds community in both knowledge and spirit.

My parents taught me than any work worth doing is worth doing as well as you can do it. That’s how I feel about journalism.

Three Stories that Persistence Made Possible for Jacqui Banaszynski (Now with more Pulitzers)

We should all be so lucky as to spend some time talking to and working with an editor as ingenious, dogged and passionate as Jacqui Banaszynski. Banaszynski is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who now holds the Knight Chair in Editing at the Missouri School of Journalism and an Editing Fellow at the Poynter Institute. She worked in newsrooms for more than 30 years, and now leads workshops for journalists around the world.

I was lucky enough to attend a writing workshop she conducted at Health Journalism 2009, and I knew I had to ask her to comment for this blog. Happily, she agreed and the next two days, you'll get two great posts from her. Today, she shares three stories that persistence made possible for her. Tomorrow, she'll answer a bunch of other questions. Stay tuned.

There are so many examples of how persistence paid off in (saved) my stories that it’s hard to know where to begin. It is no exaggeration to say that persistence — hard work, follow through, patience, a bit (OK, more than a bit) of stubbornness —had much more to do with any success I’ve had than native intelligence, writing talent or even training. There’s an old saw that reporters make their own luck, and a lot of that luck is sheer stick-to-itiveness.

The best examples from in my reporting:

Not Letting the Story Die
When a natural gas pipeline in suburban St. Paul ruptured and exploded, killing a young mother and her daughter, it was big news. Every news outlet in the region wanted an interview with the husband/father, who had survived the blast with his other daughter. But he made it clear he wasn’t talking, and after a few days, most other journalists gave up.

I continued to work the story each day, gently but constantly reaching out to other sources to try to get to the husband while respecting his privacy boundaries. Finally, about 10 days after the explosion, the husband called me. It took a little more intense work to get him to understand why I wanted to talk to him, and to agree. The interview produced one of the most compelling emotional narratives I’ve ever been privileged to do.

Reporting as a Form of Persistence
A popular young priest in Minnesota was fired by his bishop in the midst of the AIDS/gay rights battles of the late 1980s. Religion and moral/social issues were hot-button topics in Minnesota at the time, and the priest had written an article criticizing the Catholic church’s attitudes toward disenfranchised groups, especially gays.

Everyone wanted an interview with the priest to determine his motivation: Was he making a principled sacrifice on behalf of others? Or was he gay himself, and living a double life? The priest adamantly refused to talk after making an initial, brief public statement. I kept after the story, peeling off five or six related pieces over the next three or four weeks, and using each of them as an excuse to call the priest for comment. Over time, he realized I was both professional and determined; I wouldn’t give up but I wouldn’t burn him.

At the same time, I learned more about church issues, and about the priest himself. He ultimately agreed to an interview, in which he revealed that he was faithful to his vows — and that he was gay and could no longer live with the internal conflict. The resulting profile was one of the first pieces hinting at what became a major and complex national issue about homosexuality and mainstream churches.

The Importance of Support
As the AIDS crisis worsened in the mid-1980s, my editor suggested I do a death-to-diagnosis narrative of someone dying of the disease. It took a full year, talking to dozens of sources and following dozens of leads, to find the right subject for that story and to negotiate access. The result was “AIDS in the Heartland,” a four-part series that won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. And in that case, my “persistence” was helped immeasurably by photographer Jean Pieri, my partner on the project. When one of us flagged, the other pushed. Jean met our story subjects first, and paved the way for everything to come. In the same way I often needed a running partner when I was marathoning, it can help for a writer to have a partner or buddy to keep them going.

What It Means

But persistence was key in all aspects of my work — from developing trust with sources, to staying with a story over a long course of time, to calling back sources multiple times to ensure accuracy, to simply showing up for work day after day, year after year, to write paragraph after paragraph until I gained some sense of journalistic mastery and creative voice.

Too many journalists think good writing is either the result of raw talent or magic. Or they were good at it in high school so think it should be a snap to succeed professionally. They then grow frustrated when they don’t win big freelance contracts or big awards overnight. The hard truth is that writing is like music or sports: It takes years of practice, coaching (feedback) and attention — writing and then writing and then writing some more —to get good and stay good.

30-Day Economic Stability Challenge: Prioritizing Cashflow

You know the drill: You should have a good financial cushion in place before you start freelancing. But what if you don't, and you're already in business? Believe me, I've been there. Fellow freelancer Julie Sturgeon found an ingenious solution to her cashflow issues, so I asked her to share it. Generously, she agreed.

I especially like her method because it creates a "personal line of credit" without using a credit card or those home equity lines of credit The Simpsons lampooned on Sunday. I hope you, too, will find it inspiring. I challenge you to look at your spending and see if there are funds you can reallocate to create your own cashflow line of credit.

Sturgeon is a Greenwood-based writer with more than 20 years of professional writing experience. Her resumé covers everything from lifestyle reporter to investigative reporter, sports writer to editor of two business-to-business magazines. She is also a former winner of the Writer’s Digest magazine feature article contest. Besides writing, her passions are traveling, Indiana University basketball and the movie Braveheart.

Back in April of 2001 — before the 9/11 attacks, a dot.com bust, Hurricane Katrina, a stock market crash and recession— I interviewed an analyst about cash flow for a trade publication.

“A small-business owner has to stop worrying about profit and loss and start considering cash flow the lifeblood of the business," Alice Magos with Commerce Clearing House told me. "You can be terribly unprofitable and still survive as long as your cash is flowing — but by the time somebody learns that the hard way, they’re usually out of business."

It was a great quote in the article, but I wasn't a believer until my uncle confirmed it. My uncle, the small-business owner who has had his name on the outside of a funeral home for decades. Mu uncle, the man we considered the rich family member because he could actually spend money shooting at basketball hoops at a carnival until he won the big stuffed animal prizes. Yep, he confirmed, he rarely showed a profit on his taxes.

So I got it: The trick is to have money at your fingertips when you need it. But it wasn't something I focused on. After all, the cash was flowing automatically as I continued to earn more every year and incorporate my business. I set up charts to rate the profitability of each client. I cut the bottom 10 percent each year to improve those profitability numbers. I raised my minimum several times to maximize my time in the office.

And now it’s 2009, and suddenly whether or not any particular assignment earns my hourly minimum is moot. I need X dollars in my bank account each month to pay my set expenses. My accountant suggested we set up a small line of credit at the bank to draw from on those months when collections trailed behind the bill due dates.

My husband had an even better idea. He added up our mortgage payment, our monthly payment on the home equity line we took out to remodel the kitchen, and the amount we were paying back to our 401(k) plans we borrowed from when a business failed in 2007. If we remortgaged to roll all those into one payment, it would extend our timeframe to own the house free and clear from 8 years to 15, but the new interest rate meant that one payment came to only a few dollars more than the current mortgage. Essentially, the plan freed up nearly $1,700 a month in financial commitments in our household.
Starting this month, we are putting that money into a savings account as my personal line of credit. I’m not a big stickler on profit these days — in fact, I’ve lowered my hourly minimum expectations by $25 an hour — but I have the safety net I need to avoid being abused by slave wages, too. And should I need to draw on those emergency funds, I’m confident my husband will have a kinder interest rate than the bank.