Eli Saslow on the family of a slain Newtown child

Such a great story by Eli Saslow for the Washington Post a few days ago. "After Newtown shooting, mourning parents enter into the lonely quiet" was about Mark and Jackie Barden, parents of three children until their youngest, Daniel Barden, killed in his classroom.

Like others (well, at the least like one other shown below), I find myself thinking of the story in relation to some areas other than the overwhelmingly horrible loss.

I defend myself emotionally from stories like Eli's by thinking about the work. That is a perfectly written story. It's flawless.
— Chris Jones (@MySecondEmpire) June 9, 2013

The writing itself - Saslow is a someone who I've previously posted on and linked to ESPN pieces he's written and I'm sure there will be additional great analysis done on his Washington Post story, but two I've seen thus far were from the website Gangrey and by Paige Williams with a "Why's This So Good?" for Nieman Storyboard that features a breakdown of the story along with short Q&A with Saslow. As was noted by Williams and others I've seen commenting on the story, it just felt so incredibly restrained and created for myself as a reader the feeling of sitting and watching a family's life lived.

Other related writing - Two different post labels I've used on this blog are Newtown and Gabrielle Giffords and between them there's five posts that link to multiple pieces. The stories are by some great writers and run the gamut in terms of subjects and emotions. There's David Von Drehle on what happened in Tucson and why, Joe Posnanski on the loss of a young girl, Jim Dwyer on one family not knowing if their child safe, Gary Smith on how he envisions responsible gun legislation coming about from tragedy and, as a sort of counterpoint to Smith, Joe Klein, Charlie Pierce and Gabrielle Giffords on the prevention of said responsible gun legislation.

Efforts by the Bardens - It's remarkable reading in Saslow's piece of the strength that Mark and Jackie Barden show in campaigning for responsible legislation around guns. On one hand, it seems as if their efforts are futile in the face of both active opposition and passive ignoring of the problem, but on the other, the Bardens are working towards something important so perhaps the odds of their success don't matter as much as the end goal itself.

All in all, it was great work by Saslow that was both difficult to read and an important and revealing story.

Tragedy in Tucson Writing from David Von Drehle & Joe Posnanski

Two great pieces I've come across recently on the shooting in Tucson. From David Von Drehle in Time and Joe Posnanski in Sports Illustrated, they stand out as excellent for similar reasons.

Great writing is a tough thing to achieve (with the point of this blog of course being to highlight examples of it). You have to have a good subject of course (with good being made up of: interesting, important, sad, inspiring, etc), but you also have to have something that comes out in the writing itself.

Assuming that the mechanics of a piece are there and it's easy to understand and gets it's point across, great writing to me often can be characterized as either Profound, Thorough or Different.

Writing examples of this would be the piece on Jill Costello as Profound and that on the Gulf Oil Spill as Thorough... and why both stories were included in those I considered as Best or Close to Best Writing Linked To from the past year.

Profound and Thorough are me thinks a bit easier to describe or understand as concepts than Different, though. This trait in great writing is when an author takes a story (especially a heavily reported on and interesting one) and crafts solid prose about a different aspect than others are scribing about. Good example of this also from the Best Writing Linked To category was Eleven Lives about the men who perished in the explosion prior to the aforementioned Gulf Oil Spill.

It's this category of Different that the Von Drehle and Posnanski pieces on the Tucson shooting fall into (in addition to the very much evident Profound). Rather than being about cause, effect and blame of the senseless act, both are about the people who lost their lives... with the Posnanski piece focusing on the youngest victim.

Really great writing in these two stories... The Real Lesson of the Tucson Tragedy by David Von Drehle and A Death in the Family by Joe Posnanski. Highly recommended reading.