THE WRITING LIFE — Lueders fights injustice with words
Note: The Writing Life is a column that focuses on how writing can impact one's life. It features Wisconsin residents.
 By Meagan Parrish
Reporters are often the “watchdogs” who unravel complex issues and give justice a voice when others can’t. Sometimes, it seems, no one is listening. But when people do pay attention to the journalist’s message, a well-crafted story can lead to change.
Giving the tones of injustice a chance to be heard is something Bill Lueders has made a career out. As the news editor of Madison’s leading weekly newspaper, Isthmus, Lueders has spent almost 20 years shedding light on the differing viewpoints of this city’s issues with his clear and easy style of writing.
And as the author of Cry Rape, Lueders applied his reporting and editing skills to a book chronicling the saga of a rape victim and her struggles with Madison’s legal system. After its release, Lueders has also found himself in a new role as a spokesperson for a kind of mistreatment many women have endured.
“The political action has been very gratifying,” Lueders said of the response to the release of his most recent book.
Published in 2006, Cry Rape tells the tale of woman accused of fabricating her account of being raped. She then spent years battling the police, prosecutors and lawyers representing the city of Madison. After its publication, Madison’s police chief issued a formal apology to the woman and a city council resolution was introduced to compensate the woman in Lueders’s book with $35,000.
After tracking the story as a reporter for the Isthmus for several years, Lueders said he wrote the book because he felt it was as story he “had to tell.” Despite taking the time to finish writing Cry Rape from his office at home, Lueders hasn’t missed a beat at his day job.
Every Thursday and Friday, Lueders spends much of the day weaving the stories of the week into tightly sewn pieces of journalism. Even with an office perched on a busy corner in downtown Madison, Lueders has no trouble crawling into his own bubble to write.
“I could be writing sometimes and the office could burn down and I’d be the last to know,” Lueders joked. “I think I’d just go up with the office.”
Like other writers, journalists have all the tools of language at their disposal-metaphor, simile or alliteration. But to a reporter, words usually look best when dressed in simple coherency and truth. Of course, explaining a complicated issue in simple terms isn’t always so simple.
“I still feel a sense of angst when confronting a blank page,” Lueders explained. “Before I type my first words I’ll have a certain sense of anxiety about not having anything there. But I know that by starting I can relieve the pressure.”
After many years, Lueders has learned a few tricks about how to get a story written when it doesn’t want to come out.
“If it’s like 5:30 p.m. and I know I need to leave, I’ll start by writing the first half of a quote. Then I’ll leave and come back the next day and finish the quote and then I’m writing again. You motivate by doing,” he said.
When advising the interns who come to work at Isthmus, he often explains to them how news writing can be like getting lost in one of those corn mazes found all over rural Wisconsin in the fall.
“You have to rise above the corn maze and see the whole thing. Part of writing is not forcing readers to find their way through a piece. No one’s going to put up with that,” Lueders reasoned.
Although Lueders didn’t plan on becoming a reporter, he has always been a writer. Among his earliest achievements was a 47-page report on Arthur Bremer that Lueders wrote as a 7th grader in Milwaukee. Not surprisingly, Lueder’s teacher recommended that he pursue a career in journalism.
In college, Lueders went for a degree in English instead but then co-founded the weekly Shepherd Express, an alternative newspaper in Milwaukee that’s still going strong after 25 years.
Lueders re-located to Madison in 1986 to become news editor at Isthmus and has since become a master at chiseling down his stories until they are tidy and precise, a characteristic of news writing that has carried over into his work as an author.
At the worst of times, telling these stories, Lueders has found, can be “emotionally difficult.” But at the best of times, he can at least “help people understand how the system they live in works.”
And even better, his writing can promote change.
“When people call [at Isthmus] with issues, I take it really seriously,” Lueders explained. “I feel like that’s what I’m here for.”
(Note: Photo contributed by Bill Lueders.)
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