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December
12, 2001
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Narrative
Journalism Comes of Age
Recently
a group of distinguished storytellers traveled to Cambridge, Mass.,
to coach their peers in the craft, the professional challenges,
and the ethical considerations of narrative journalism.
Several audience members supplied this joint Nieman-Poynter project
with informal "letters to colleagues" recounting the
practical and professional advice served in the sessions. These
letters are the first fruits of the workshop, from which more
and better narrative writing may flow.
| THE
NEXT GENERATION OF NARRATIVE JOURNALISM |
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Excerpts
from Mark
Kramer's closing essay:
"The
second stage of narrative journalism involves finding useful
and comfortable ways in-house of adjusting to the uneven
scheduling of narrative writers' time, finding space, finding
and assigning flexibly the attention of those editors who
can best handle this special copy.
"... the second stage also involves coming to more
sophisticated realizations of what narrative is for. Later
serials take on less lurid but more complex subjects ...
and they require greater technical proficiency in narrative
writing in order to sustain reader-interest."
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| WRITING
A GOOD STORY |
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• The
hardest
part is getting started. Chip Scanlan advises writers
to abandon their standards, and just start writing.
• Isabel
Wilkerson explains the importance of the face-to-face conversation,
and lists the seven
phases of the interview.
• The
three most beautiful words in the English language, says
Tom French, are "to be continued." Each
good story has an engine, an unanswered question
that pulls the reader through.
• Mark
Kramer offers 10 ways to build a compelling
experience for the reader; For example, finding
hints of personality in each character.
• Great
stories don't require larger-than-life characters. Gay Talese
made a brilliant career of his interest in the lives of
everyday
people.
• Choose
your words carefully, says Emily Hiestand. Describe
your subject before you write about it.
• Set
each story as a three-act
drama, says Nora Ephron. Force yourself to identify
the beginning, middle, and end.
• Joe
Franklin adds fiction writing doesn't have a monopoly on
elements like character,
rhythm, and plot.
• Ira
Glass sets three requirements for each of his stories. The
first is that there must be at least one moment
of amusement that belongs to him.
• If
the all of these rules and techniques leave you dry, try
Rick Bragg's no-nonsense advice: just
tell a good story.
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| TELLING
WITH PICTURES |
• Stan
Grossfeld bravely tells a room full of writers that their
word-controlled world is wrong. Storytellers, he says, should
know how to use
both pictures and words.
• David
Fanning warns that too many TV news segments are created by
finding compelling pictures and then writing words to match
them. Never write for the pictures, he says. Write
for the story. |
| THE
SPACE BETWEEN FACT AND FICTION |
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• Sometimes
narrative journalism seems too detailed to be true. Adam
Hochschild reassures us that accuracy
is just as important in narrative as in hard news.
• "Everything
is a Rorschach," declares Nora Ephron, who
says she lost faith in journalism when she realized that
each person might find a different truth in the same collection
of facts.
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