Speaker: Rick Bragg
Session: Writing in Color
Dec. 1, 2001, 11:15-12:30 p.m.

By Marc Kaufman

You’d think this would be a hell of a learning experience. How often do you get a chance to hear a guy like Rick Bragg talk about narrative journalism? I mean, this guy has everything there is to offer -- from the talent to the instinct to the experience. He’s one of the best feature writers in the business. So, you’d think he’d tell us all about constructing features. Reporting them. Writing them.

He didn’t.

He just told us stories. War stories. Sob stories. Personal stories. Stories. There were a couple hundred of us in the room, notebooks out, pens poised. But how do you take notes on his memories? Not that it wasn’t entertaining. It could not have been more so. The guy is a storyteller. No doubt about it. That’s what he does and he does it with the best of them. We were alternately laughing, riveted and surprised as he moved from one nugget of his past to another with a fluidity that perfectly complemented his southern drawl and self effacing sense of humor.

But I didn’t learn anything about writing features. I wanted to know how he gets his story ideas, how he approaches interviews, organizes his piece, thinks and rethinks his leads. He didn’t tell us that. He didn’t tell us the secret of narrative journalism.

Or did he …

When I asked myself what he did tell us, the answer came without hesitation: Stories. He told us stories. Good ones. And he did it in a way that captivated and compelled.

Visceral, if not visual.

Maybe the information I was looking for was in fact available in the 75 minutes I had just spent with a guy I respect as much as anyone else currently doing what he does. And maybe that’s his point.

Bragg’s storytelling in the conference forum was equally compelling as his print versions. In his opinion, "telling a good story involves imagery, detail and color." That much was obvious as he verbally shared the story of the small North Carolina town that banned sofas from the front porches of houses. It was clear when he told, haltingly, of the young man who followed the caretaker around and around the grounds of a Haitian graveyard, looking, in vain, for the resting place of a family member. The words, the tone, the mannerism, the humor -- all converge to create a compelling experience. And that seemed to be what he was urging the rest of us to do in our writing. He had us rolling in the aisles one minute and reaching for a tissue the next, and he had us all hungering to read stories like these in the newspapers.

"The way to do it is just to paint a picture," he said. Sounds simple enough, right? At least it did as I listened to Bragg do it as if it were second nature. And maybe that’s the answer. Just as simple and a lot less pretentious than struggling over how to work in the nut graph, where to place the quote from the deceased’s mother or whatnot. Just paint a damn picture. Through his accessibility and his ability to instill emotion in his audience, he was leading by example. "Follow me, y’all …" Just pull out the brush, the pallet, the paints … and start covering the canvass. Use bright colors. Bold strokes. Draw on your experience -- not a textbook or old notes from the magazine writing class you took in J-school.

Bragg told us about covering stories in Pakistan and Oklahoma City. He spoke of Sept. 11, Sister Helen Prejean (the nun played by Susan Sarandon in "Dead Man Walking"), a tornado that ripped through a church minutes from his birthplace. In the stories were fear, tragedy, wonder, evil and even beauty. The common thread was not that these stories involved death … it was that these stories were told in full color.

And that is the secret to good storytelling. Or at least that’s what Rick Bragg seemed to be telling us.

I guess maybe I learned exactly what I wanted to know after all …

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