Tissue-paper skin and branches that poke the bottom of the sky

How to show and not tell.

Journalism is too opaque and misunderstood. Chills gives a behind-the-scenes look at how dangerous investigative journalism gets made. 

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Look out your window. Write down what you see. You have five minutes.

A few different weather systems are moving in — I can tell from the distinctive cloud shapes stretching through my more than 180-degree view. The light is softening over the mountains, and the trees are swelling with red, yellow and green buds — pointillized like a Seurat painting, thus creating a whole.

I wrote that as I waited for my students at NYU Journalism to do the same assignment: Look out the window and write a few sentences about what you see, in five minutes.

We did it at the very end of our three-hour class, which we’d spent dissecting two excellent features. One, by Lizzie Johnson, ran in The Washington Post in August 2021 and was called “The wildfire was everywhere. Could a school bus driver and 22 kids find a way out?” I’d admired this tick-tock (journalism speak for a minute-by-minute account) about a school bus trying to escape the fire in Paradise, Calif., and had written about it here.

Johnson’s minutely detailed descriptions were what really got me. So much so that I had to contact her to confirm that she hadn’t actually been on the bus. Her writing lets us feel the anxiety of two teachers as they attend to 22 elementary school kids who are on the verge of passing out from carbon dioxide and “pizza-oven” heat. The children’s “lips were chapped from the smoke and dehydration, and their faces were pink with exertion,” Johnson writes.

The other story we read and talked about was by Ellen Barry. “The Jungle Prince of Delhi” appeared in The New York Times in November 2021. Below the headline, the dek (or summary, as editors at The Times call it, unlike any other editors I’ve ever worked with) reads: “For 40 years, journalists chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined palace in the Indian capital. It was a tragic, astonishing story. But was it true?”

Barry’s story is a remarkable piece of journalism that I highly urge you to read. (She also did an absorbing podcast about it.) What happened to the family of Oudh in and of itself is fascinating, but, also, Barry brings forth the oddity and sadness of the family’s demise with delicate, descriptive passages like this:

Once, he asked me to kiss him on the cheek — his skin felt fragile, like tissue paper — and he told me that it was the first time he had been kissed in 10 years. “When you are over here, my heart goes doopity doo, Sophia Loren,” he said.

Like tissue paper. A beautiful way to express the man’s fragility. And what a quote.

The reason I had my students read these two articles was because some of them have been struggling with showing instead of telling. And while I have tried to explain what I mean by that over and over, it wasn’t working. By the end of this class, however, in the assignment of writing a few sentences describing what they saw out of their window, they got it. All of their descriptions were refulgent, lush with meaning, without using endless adjectives and adverbs.

Here are a few examples:

It’s the last week of March, but a few houses down from mine, a bricked, three-story house still glistens with its awkward up and down outlines of Christmas lights. I wonder why they haven’t taken it down, but it definitely makes this cold, windy night look a little less monotonous.

A pile of dead leaves, assorted sandwich wrappers and soda cans stack up against the half-broken window leading out of my basement. They lie in an escape well, one meant to help me escape this house if it were to burn down. But, the two-pane window is far too small for anyone but a child to escape. It’s a constant reminder of my mortality. Even the grass beyond the well has given up and is slowly rotting in place.

The night is black — the only evidence of a light flurry is illuminated by a light that shines on a tree that stands like a lone man in an empty field.

There is a dead tree. Its arms lift above the surrounding luscious greenery, gently poking the bottom of the sky almost as if it is trying to grasp onto life. But, its branches continue to dangle and die, falling toward the sidewalk below.

Every single student’s description moved me, and I am just so proud of them.

I’ve not taught much before, and seeing these new journalists grow makes me smile — the kind of smile you can only see in the crinkles of someone’s eyes, because their hand is covering their mouth in wonderment.

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On Chills, there are no ads, and no outside influences because of it. This is a subscriber-supported space that gives a behind-the-scenes look at how risky investigative journalism gets made, from a journalist with 20 years of experience. Read Chills for free, or subscribe for bonus content like this. You can sign up here. Thank you for supporting independent journalism.