The Best Sentence I Ever Wrote was Never Published—Until Today
I think most reporters have them. They’re the ones that got away—the story, or interview, or paragraph, the quote, the revelation that we, for some reason, missed out on. It’s the thing that we think would have been our peak, the piece of work where we did our absolute best work, and did it without reservations.
For me, it was a line I wrote in 2012 when I was working with the ARA Network in Berlin. We were putting together first-hand reporting from the Syrian civil war on behalf of The Washington Times. Even though the article was bylined to myself and Michael Gunn, it was put together using other stringers and wire service reports. To my great shame, I can’t remember the names of the stringers.
Of everyone credited, I had the easiest job, sitting in a warm office in Berlin, half a world away from the action, and managing the expectations of the editors in the US and the contributions of my reporters. My overall role was to take what was coming in, check it, and work all of it into a story. But I cared a lot about the safety of our people and prayed every second that nothing would happen to them that we could not fix.
Once we thought everything was in, I sat and wrote the line that has stayed with me.
“There is a village somewhere in northern Syria in which twenty-four graves have recently been filled.”
And that was it. It was, by far, the best sentence I’d ever written in a newsroom. For me, it had everything. There was a storytelling approach to its beginning, (There is a village somewhere in northern Syria…), a graphic and arresting image of twenty-four graves, and the accusation of the passive voice that the perpetrators of the crime, those that killed those civilians, were not yet known.
To date, I don’t know if those who killed that day have ever been identified.
So the story was put together in the Germany office and I went home and it was sent over to the US. And between it being published in the paper and being put online, things changed. The body count in that village in Syria climbed to thirty and the reporters on the ground found more colour, more story, more people, and all that was added to the piece. And as all that was done, my lede—the best lede I ever wrote and the standard by which all my ledes are now measured—was taken out and discarded. So far, I’m the only person to have ever taken note of it.
So I’m putting it out there so it may have more of a life. Well, more of a life than it ever would have had than before.
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