We've talked about Andy Newman's story a few times (here and here) but if there's ever been one worth revisiting, it's that piece.
Kruse hit him up for some more info. Read it again, and consider their back and forth:
MICHAEL: The $64,000 questions about the story on the $65 table: How did it come up? How did you hear about it? And once it did come up, what made you choose to structure it the way you did, saving Mr. Klein's weird, random death 'til three grafs from the end?
ANDY: i got incredibly lucky on this one. the guy who bought the table is a friend of a times reporter. he asked her to put him in touch with the reporter who wrote the initial story about the murder. that was me.
as to how it wound up with a somewhat nonconventional structure (for a newspaper story), it was just the only structure that made sense. i knew immediately that the only way to tell the story so that the murder would have any real impact on the reader was to spring it at the end. i've tried stuff like that a few times here at the times but always gotten bounced, but this time my editor, who suggested maybe having a mention of the murder up high, quickly agreed with me that it was way better to save it for the end.
most of the work of the story was just boiling it down. initially it was supposed to be very short, like 500 words, for this short-feature thing we do on tuesdays called INK, but when i started writing i knew that wouldn't be enough, so i asked to take it out of the Ink well and give it more space. soon it had ballooned to like 1100 words which i knew was way too long. so i started chipping away.
the guy who bought the table, a playwright, had mentioned that the whole episode had reminded him of a john cheever story called 'the lowboy' about a family battle over a piece of furniture, and i had never read cheever at all, so i (uncharacteristically) got his collected stories out of the library and actually read a bunch of them. i had avoided cheever because i don't much like reading stories about the problems of rich people, but i was completely won over by the ruthless economy of his prose and in fact his general ruthlessness, and tried to bring it to bear on my story, doing as much by inference rather than exposition as i could get away with. (lest you think we at the times always have the leisure on every story to sit around reading cheever and honing our prose for days on end, suffice it to say that we do not).
the main trim to the story, though, was done by the metro editor, who simply lopped off the last 200 words. he said it had the best chance of getting on page 1 that way, and once it was accepted for page 1 i was in no position to argue with him, even though i loved a lot of what was in the trimmed part and thought it put the whole episode more in perspective. in the end, though, i had to agree that the shorter version packed more punch.
if you wanna compare the 2 endings, you may do so:
published ending:
Mr. Klein 's shooting remains unsolved. The police have not been able to find a witness. The table sits 10 feet from Mr. Willimon's bed, next to the desk where he writes all day. He looks over and sees Mr. Klein on his knees, polishing the table legs.
original ending
Mr. Klein's shooting remains unsolved. The table sits 10 feet from Mr. Willimon's bed, next to the desk where he writes all day. He thinks about Mr. Klein on his knees polishing the table legs.
"It's kind of like having a tombstone in your dining room," he said as he sat at the table last Thursday, smoking.
But he cannot let go of the table. Or of Mr. Klein. He pulled up a photo on his computer and pointed to a young man in a basketball uniform.
"This is Keval Williams, who pulled him out of his car," he said, the last person to see Mr. Klein alive, or possibly the first to see him dead. Either way, Mr. Willimon would like to talk with him if he can find the nerve.
Mr. Willimon thinks about contacting Mr. Klein's brother, his grown children.
"It's a delicate balance," he said. "These people might say, 'What is this, some kind of morbid curiosity?' " He conceded that his interest in Mr. Klein may be, in part, professional. "But it's more than that. He was a real person. I want to know who he was."
"This is random," Mr. Willimon said. "But at some point it's as random as you choose it to be. And it's not random anymore."
thanks for the attention,
andy
(Cool of Andy to do that. Michael, too. Look for more posts like this in the future. Hope you find them useful.)
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