In Search of Story

By JAN WINBURN
Special to Poynter.org

If you're a news reporter, a feature writer, or a news reporter who occasionally writes features, ask yourself: How can I distinguish my stories from all those others that fill the pages of the newspaper?

The answer is to employ narrative techniques in every-day assignments. And to do this, you have to find true stories, tales with tension, tales that unfold.

But how do you train yourself to see those stories? To think that way?

1. Who has something at stake?

In "One Good Thing on Top of Another," Lisa Pollak discovered that the story was not, as assigned, about the winner of the National Oreo Cookie Stacking Contest. The superior story was the girl who didn't win. And why? Because she had more at stake.

Well, that's the first step. Finding the tension. Now, you have to maintain that tension throughout the piece. How many of us would have written a "news feature" lede (rather than tell a story) that would have gone something like this:

Nyasba Dixon finally has a room to call her own.

The 7-year-old Baltimore girl failed to win the $20, 000 first prize in the National Oreo Cookie Stacking Contest last week, which she hoped would allow her family to move to a bigger house. But her dream came true, anyway.

Entertaining, maybe. But it may as well be a news story written inverted-pyramid style. We know the ending, and the tension is gone.

2. Where did it all begin?

This is a great question to apply to news stories. Mike Ollove asked it during the McGwire-Sosa homerun chase. As fans became increasingly aggressive about catching the homerun balls, the question was raised about what would become of the record-setting ball: what would it be worth?

Where did it all begin? Not with McGwire or Sosa. Not in St. Louis or Chicago. But on Oct. 1, 1961, in New York, when a fan caught Roger Maris' record-setting homerun ball. "The Catch of a Lifetime" was conceived, reported and written in a day and a half.

3. Who's doing the work? (Otherwise known as who has the shovel?)

This question inspired Jimmy Breslin's story on the gravedigger who dug JFK's grave at Arlington.

For Dan Fesperman, the answer to this question led him to the most colorful character in a small-town flap in Western Maryland. Lawsuits were flying between the city, the police, the local NAACP and the newspapers over access to an escort service's "little black book." Lost in all the hot-air seriousness was the owner of the service. She became the subject of Dan's piece, "Thoroughly Modem Madam."

4. Is there an ordinary person whose life is somehow like this?

An example spun off the Clinton/Hillary dilemma would be the story of a couple who has lived through adultery and put their marriage back together. Or, a spin off Monica: the life of a regular 21-year-old. Or the life of another White House intern.

What about the old perennials? Is there a way to find a narrative in those story assignments we get time and again: the shopping blitz around Christmas, graduation, prom, Halloween, Opening Day at the ballpark, the first (or last) day of school.

What about the tired topic the editor orders up a story on: say, for instance, the Pokemon craze?

Most often, in these assignments our focus is the same. We position our camera at exactly the same place, at a distance, and we use a wide-angle lens, taking in a little bit of everything. Every person quoted and every fact cited carries the same weight. We've collected "color" and "quotes," not story.

But what if you focus the camera differently? Take that wide-angle down to a close-up.

Laura Lippman lets us see one girl going through the prom ritual of shopping for "The Perfect Dress." Sarah Pekkanen goes into a costume store near Halloween to find and follow home her truly obsessed subject for "Tricks Up Her Sleeve."

Or, in the case of the editor who wants a Pokemon story (old news) timed for the debut of the Pokemon movie's debut (new hook), Larry Bingham gives us a close-up: a look at how the craze came to one little school, and the "Lesson In the Cards."

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Jan Winburn is Assistant Managing Editor for Enterprise at the Baltimore Sun.