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Francis Flaherty has worked for more than seventeen years at The New York Times. He has written for Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Commonweal, and The Progressive and teaches journalism at NYU. He lives with his wife and two children in Brooklyn, New York.

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Most writing books dwell on common issues of style and grammar. Yet most writers also confront complex problems of story design.This 50-rule guide by Francis Flaherty, a New York Times editor, offers much-needed solutions and sage advice to address these concerns.

"Sometimes, say things sideways," Flaherty writes. "The reader will be grateful." "White is whitest on black," he observes. "Let contrast work for you." Through such hard-won, story-level insights, sprinkled with examples from real stories and leavened with a good dose of newsroom memoir, The Elements of Story merits a spot on every writer's shelf.

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The Elements of Story

HarperCollins

Chapter One

The Sunday Business Section of the Times deals only with business, the economy and personal finance, which makes its Op-Ed page the province of fairly arid subjects. During my years as the editor of that page in the early 90's, its top five topics would probably have been downsizing, re-engineering, emerging markets, the federal deficit and global business transparency (don't ask). Pretty abstract stuff, but the upside of this abstruse field was this: If a writer or editor learned to put a human face on a piece about the federal deficit, he learned to put it on anything.

That is what happened to me. One of the other big business stories of those days, the decline of brands, is a good illustration of my experience:

Cowed by the recession of the early 90's, Americans grew reluctant to fork over extra cash just for the privilege of buying a product with a brand name. Business executives reacted fast, slashing prices on their big brands and offering cheap, no-frills, brandless products as well. The upshot was that brands, long cherished in corporate boardrooms as money in the bank, became much less lucrative.

In July 1993, I wrote a column about this business story:

When I heard that brands were dead or dying, I thought about the Cadillac Man. His name was Steve Saccardo, and he lived across the street from us in our Long Island town. He worked in a gas station, kept an immaculate lawn, and achieved some local notoriety one Thanksgiving when a cooked turkey came flying out an unopened window of his house.

But mostly he was the Cadillac Man. Every year or two he'd buy a new Cadillac, usually a dark color. The practice caused the expected notice in a town where Chevys and Fords were the norm.

Mr. Saccardo didn't say much about his Cadillac, but I suspect that when he swung onto the Meadowbrook Parkway he became in his mind's eye whatever it was he most aspired to be. And, on the anonymous road, with only his car to go by, other travelers probably saw him the same way: Cadillac Man.

To corporations, of course, brands (including car models) are bottom-line tools, devised to segment the market and reduce the elasticity of demand. They've done these things well, but now they're faltering. Sharp-eyed shoppers are grabbing generic shampoo in utilitarian packages. Procter & Gamble, the temple of Crest and other premium brands, is slashing its work force. Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco are slashing cigarette prices.

All this reminded me of Mr. Saccardo. Brands may be corporate gravy and sure they cost more, but they also have their uses. It's something the sharp-eyed shoppers should keep in mind.

Brands let you define yourself, for instance. In college, I smoked Old Golds for a time. This meant that I was not an alienated brooder (Camels) or a salon intellectual (Gauloise) or a cowboy wannabe (Marlboros). What I was I don't know, but brands let me say what I wasn't.

Snobs love costly brands, of course, but so do people with more worthwhile purposes. I know a woman who's had tough times. Money has sometimes been tight, but she has always used only Chanel perfume. This lone luxury helps soften the hard edges of her life. It's brand-as-therapy.

I don't think that Wal-Mart Econo-Size Valu-Pak Perfume would satisfy this human need.

Brands also bring memories. I remember the Charles Chips man delivering his big tan tins of potato chips to our house, and the smell of oil and salt and potato when my sisters and I pried the cover off. I eat them to this day, even though the tins and the delivery man are long gone. My wife recalls fondly the taste of Ipana toothpaste ("Brusha, brusha, brusha! New Ipana toothpaste!"), and I recall, less fondly, the awful smell of that Toni hair goo ("Which twin has the Toni?") that my sisters used. I also remember that candy powder from the 60's (Lick 'em Aid?), and how it turned your tongue parentally alarming colors.

With no jingles or jazzy packages, plain products have no such hold on memory. Who would remember Wonder Bread if not for the name and the package with the cheery-colored circles? And, anyway, what exactly were the 12 ways it built strong bodies?

But brands don't confer just spot memories. They mark the broad contours of a life. My own Entenmann Chocolate Donut Period comes to mind.

But brands are practical too. They impose quality control. Take Sergeant Fury and his Howling Commandos. Like other kids in the 60's, I avidly read World War II comic books. Some lured you with lots of action on the cover, but inside the colors were pale, the plots desultory. Not Sergeant Fury. He gave you gore and glory on every page.

So it is with brands. A candy lover may pay more for Mounds, but he or she knows exactly what's inside the crinkly red and white paper, sitting on that dark brown cardboard skid with the folded-up sides.

Brands do more than forestall unpleasant surprises, though. In time, they transcend themselves. Consider the Klondike Bar, a satisfying square of ice cream wrapped in silver foil stamped with a picture of a polar bear. Eat enough of them through the years on sweltering summer days, and soon, for you, they are coolness itself. You've thought about them so much in the dog days of August that you can taste them even when you don't have any.

Then, eventually, when you do eat one, it tastes on your tongue much as it did in your mind. It's hard to tell the difference. This is the summit of brands: the place where hope and reality mix, where a pumper of gas can become a Cadillac Man.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Elements of Storyby Francis Flaherty Copyright © 2009 by Francis Flaherty . Excerpted by permission.
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