Winning by Losing   

Profound disappointment over being an unsuccessful Pulitzer finalist had a huge impact on a Portland journalist.

I was halfway down the stairwell, one back in the far reaches of the Oregonian's newsroom, when I realized that I was a character in a story. Had I been profiling this 44-year-old man, I would have seized upon this moment as a wonderful opening scene in a narrative.

The subject has just encountered a complication both internal and external, two criteria that will make for compelling hooks to draw readers deep into the story.

Moments ago this man learned, officially, that he had lost the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, the pinnacle in American journalism, in the category of feature writing.

What's he thinking?

Watch how he slowly makes his way down the steps.

See how he walks out the tunnel so he doesn't have to talk with anyone.

For all the talk about the prestige of being a Pulitzer finalist, there is really no more bittersweet distinction in all of journalism. It begins when word of the finalists is leaked. That starts a five-week buildup. The other stories are studied, and odds are calculated. There are fleeting moments when it's possible to imagine actually winning.

The day the awards are announced, the light shines brightly on the winner. The two remaining finalists go back to work, tortured, feeling that they are somehow losers.

As I headed home that day, that's what I called myself. Loser. Twice I had been a Pulitzer finalist, and twice I had lost. The first time, I was stunned to be in such good company. But in 1999 I thought I had a good shot at winning the prize for feature writing.

That night, I tried to find solace by linking myself with other losers. Bob Dole had been clobbered by Bill Clinton, and Dole was doing just fine. Dan Marino wasn't going to get his Super Bowl ring, but everyone called him a great quarterback. A friend tried to cheer me up, telling me the Rolling Stones had never won a Grammy.

The truth was that losing had shaken something in me.

Not only did I doubt myself, but I also wondered if the narrative form was a viable way to tell a story in a newspaper.

Had the story failed me?

Or had I failed the story?

Few people can relate to a writer's fragile psyche. And writers are reluctant to admit to each other how insecure we really are. So I grappled alone with those questions and others that soon followed.

The search for answers set me on a spiritual journey in which I, ultimately, began asking questions that went far beyond journalism and awards. During the next few months, I learned things about myself. I grew stronger in some convictions, and I let others go. I saw the world and the people in it a little differently. I developed stronger eyes and a wiser heart.

I remembered why I had wanted to become a journalist in the first place. The lure had never been to cover politics or issues. No, the draw had been the people. And the assignment, at least the way I saw it, had been quite simple: Step into someone's world, learn about it, and then craft a story in such a way that a reader would feel as if he or she had been there with me. Over the years I had evolved from telling straight, inverted pyramid news on the police beat to more traditional feature stories. And in the last decade, I moved into a new territory--narrative, the engine that drove nearly all of my stories.

Now, in the middle stages of my career, I was convinced that narrative was the best way to tell compelling, emotional stories. My job then, my responsibility and overriding duty, was to the story. That required an even deeper study of the narrative techniques. What is a complication? When are the true moments when a character has the epiphany, or point of insight?

So I studied. I read and re-read the works of some of the masters. I tore apart some of my old stories--yes, even the entry that had been a Pulitzer finalist--looking for the strengths, as well as the flaws and weaknesses.

And then I had my own point of insight about this thing I call a story.

Although I had always sensed it, I was now persuaded that a story was more than a character, a situation and a set of facts. The story itself lives and breathes. A story, too, has a heart and destiny all its own. My job was to find that soul.

In the fall of 1999, I walked into my editor's office and told him what I'd been thinking about in the months since that grim day in April. Losing the Pulitzer, I said, had forced me to learn some things about myself. The one truth that emerged, I told him as I left his office, was that I felt compelled to write stories.

Two months later, I was sitting at my desk when the telephone rang. A man said he had been reading my stories over the years. He had an idea for me. He was friends with a Portland family whose son had a severely disfigured face. The family, he said, had never talked about their son. But if they did, he thought I'd be the right person to tell the story.

I asked him to approach the family. He did, and a week later I was sitting in a dining room talking with 14-year-old Sam Lightner and his mother, Debbie.

And so began a remarkable story--one that would over the next year test every part of me in the way that no story had during my 25 years in the business. I was challenged as a human and as a writer. But because of my search for answers to questions, I felt ready. The result was "The Boy Behind the Mask," a four-part series that ran in the Oregonian in early October 2000.

And in April, when the Pulitzers were announced, I stood in the newsroom and listened to my colleagues applaud when I learned that I had won the prize for feature writing.

I remain convinced that had I not lost the Pulitzer in 1999, had I not asked tough questions of myself, of my heart and mind, I would have been unable to fully serve a story as powerful and magical as Sam's.

Because I lost, I won.