Your stories --- go read them!

Thanks for a great class, for giving it a go, for believing in the magic of narrative storytelling. So here are your final projects. Read them. See what your classmates have been up to. And feel free to offer comments on this post.

Beauty Pageant at Jamestown Mall

Josiah

Comic Con

Moving Forward

Life Isn't Over

The Coffin He Built For His Mother

This is the end

"If you want to write about man, write about a man."

 - E.B. White

Chris Jones says

Not All Smurfs and Sunshine

Fatal distraction, annotated

Fatal Distraction

On copying

What other writers can teach us, Imitation, reverberation and inspiration

Reading for next class

The Things That Carried Him

Fatal Distraction

And the Pulitzer goes to ....

The Pulitzer Prizes, journalism's top honor, were announced yesterday. A full list is here, with links to the winning entries. And you might notice something, too:

Say what?

There was plenty of shock about this.

This isn't the first time this has happened. No award was given in this category back in 2004.

Many theories, but I think it comes down to how subjective good feature writing is. Other categories don't rely so heavily on just a good story -- remember the laws of importance and the laws of interesting? Well, feature writing basically rests on "law of interesting" alone, while the others all benefit from having some kind of importance attached to them. And folks can more readily agree on what's important rather than interesting. NSA secrets? Important. Abuses by big corporations? Important.

Supporting this idea is that the Pulitzer for fiction (yes, they do arts and letters, too) has not gone to any work seven times over the years. And again, fiction is a pretty subjective field.

A place to send your personal narratives

Jen passes along this from Sun Magazine, a magazine I remember seeing and reading in B&N not too long ago.

And there's a due date coming up: May 1

Knocking on doors

Here is a rag-tag collection journalists answering the question of, do you knock on doors for stories?

The correct answer, almost always, yes. Please yes.  

Narrative story tips

From the annual Boston University narrative conference, here is some advice -- I've highlighted the best bits.

Always good to be reminded of this stuff.





Go to the next page!

Your story ideas

Elmore Leonard's Rules for Writing

Using adverbs is a mortal sin

• 10 Rules of Writing
• by Elmore Leonard
• Buy the book

LaTasha's story

What's due for April 3

We're running out of time. So a final project is due at semester's end. 1500-3000 words.

** Bring in 3 story ideas. You have a wider range of possibilities here. You can do a story that happens entirely in the past, like someone who dies in a car wreck and you recreate that last car ride. Or you can do a story about someone running their first marathon or 5k or someone running in memory of their dead dad. Where do you find a story like that? On a race calendar. And you call up the organizers and you explain you're looking for a great story, some runner who has a compelling story. Do this a week before the race or two weeks. And find that right person, call them up and begin your reporting.

Or go find your own Little Miss Sunshine. But, professor, that was a movie! Was it? Because here is a list of pageants happening around here.

So you can recreate, you don't have to witness every moment in a story. But realize that witnessing makes for better and easier reporting. So I would not recommend on doing a story that occurs too far in the past -- unless it still reverberates in some kind of action and/or result today.

** Read this. "Eating Jack Hooker's Cow." We talked about cows the last class. But this is not why we're reading this. We're reading this because it's amazing. And because it will make you think about feature and narrative in a different way. Your last assignment was something like this -- regular action that might not seem significant, but really is.

** Read "Writing for Story" pages 22-90, plus the preface. You'll see.

** If you are still waiting to turn in your final version of your 1st narrative, do that on the day we agreed. Also, please read LaTasha's piece, marked it up with suggestions -- and leave some comments in the comments section here so she can read them.

Little Miss Sunshine

Stalking the feature

Stalking the feature story

How to avoid wasting time chasing bad ideas

More required reading: "Little Miss Sunshine" script

So I posted this late, but please read to page 39 in the script for "Little Miss Sunshine."

(Thanks to Jen for the great suggestion.)

Feel free to read the entire 110-page script. Scripts read quick.

It's a classic story. Think: What is the complication faced by the characters? What must they overcome? What is the plot, the mystery driving the story? What sets things in motion? What is the big picture theme being communicated via the action?

Here's the trailer, in case you haven't seen this gem of a movie:

Required reading: Why is Davion still not adopted?

A follow-up story on whatever became of that young man who wanted to be adopted:

"My name is Davion," he said softly. "And I've been in foster care since I was born."

Davion Navar Henry Only, 15, told the church full of strangers he never knew his real family. "But I know God hasn't given up on me," he said softly. "I just hope he finds me a home — and a family."

The Tampa Bay Times story was picked up by news outlets across the world. Davion's plea to be adopted was featured onGood Morning America and Al Jazeera America and in People.Producers flew him to New York to talk to Barbara Walters onThe View.

And 10,000 people from across the globe called to ask about helping or adopting him.

Learning from fiction and the movies

Using Fiction Techniques To Tell True Stories

What The Movies Can Teach Us

How to Grab Readers' Attention

Narrative does not (usually) tell the reader about the story as traditional journalists do but as novelists and screen writers do. The narrative writer reveals the story so the reader watches and comes to the reader's own conclusions about the significance of the events the reader has observed. Show, don't tell. Mark Twain: "Don't say the old lady screamed -- bring her on and let her scream."

                                        -- Don Murray

Foreshadowing

Creates suspense. Creates anticipation.

A clue or allusion in the story predicting a later event or revelation. Something a character says or does. An event whose full meaning is not understood until much later, etc. Foreshadowing can be spooky/obvious or hidden. But it should be an obvious clue in retrospect.

Alfred Hitchcock on bombs and tension

Chekhov’s gun

What it means for you: Choose details carefully. Helps you decide what to include and what to discard.

Character development

Characters not only exist in three dimensions — but they somehow change over the course of the story.

Emotional attachment

What drives/motivates the character?

History of how they got this point — and where they are going.

Movies like Royal Tennebaums and Lost in Translation

Hannibal Lecter

Dude in Big Lebowski

Dialogue

Glengarry Glen Ross

Social Network

Conflict/Plot

Confrontation between two or more things, one wins

(Other option: exposition and contrast, as explained here)

as defined by legendary screenwriting coach Syd Field

Act 1/Set up -------------- Inciting Incident --------- Plot Pt. 1/Reversal ----- End Act 1

Intro characters / goals

Set place and time

                                                                                              Event sets plot in motion

                                                                                                                                                                                               New event, plot moves in new dir.

Act 2 / Confrontation -------- Midpoint ---------------- Plot Pt. 2 --------------- End Act 2

Lead confronts obstacles

Again and again

                                                                                                    Lead seems to achieve goals

                                                                                                        Everything falls apart

                                                                                                                                                                                                         New event, plot moves in new dir.

Act 3 / Resolution ------------ Climax ------------------Denouement ----------- End Act 3

High action

                                                                                              Tension at highest

                                                                                                   Obstacles dealt with

                                                                                                                                                                                                 Wrap up / Big picture/ calm                           

Good Will Hunting

*******************

1 min recap

ACT 1

Marty McFly goes to see Doc at his garage. Not there. Gets phone call. Doc says meet me at the mall at 1:15 a.m. Goes to school. Dreams of being a rock-n-roll star. Talks with his girlfriend. Notes that the clock tower has been broken since being struck by lightning 40 years ago. Dad (George) is a wimp. Biff is dad's boss and acts like a jerk to dad. Home life is kinda depressing.

Inciting Incident

Has to go meet Doc at mall. Sends dog Einstein 1 minute into the future. Car returns. Doc sets machine to go back 40 years, to the time when he first thought of a time travel machine. Doc gets shot by Libyans in mall lot. Marty jumps in Delorean ... back in time he goes.

Plot Pt. 1

How will he go back?

ACT II

Goes back to 1955. Runs out of gas. Marty McFly walks into town after hiding the car. Marty sees that Biff has bullied and tormented George since they were both teenagers. Follows his future dad and sees his peeping in on his future mom. Says dad's life by pushing him out of car's way. Ends up in his future mom's house, being cared for by her. Finds Doc. Tells him he's from the future.

Midpoint

Doc vows to get him back to the future. But how? Recalls lightning strike set to happen soon.

Plot Pt. 2

But Mart's family photos are fading due to his interference from traveling back in time. He needs to get his parents back on track.

As Marty fades away while playing the guitar in the school dance, his parents finally kiss, causing him to rise up and keep playing the song.  His brother and sister appear in the picture again, and it seems his future is secure.

Act 3

Need to get back to future. Lightning strike sends him on his way. Marty sets to arrive 15 minutes early to prevent Doc's death.

Climax

Races to the scene but is too late. Discovers Doc is wearing a bullet-proof vest. Doc reveals he plans to go 30 years in the future next.

Denouement

Doc shows up dressed in futuristic clothing. Tells Marty to get in. "Where we're going, we don't need roads."

Required reading

So I'm going to read your narratives, and you're going to read these two pieces:

The $1 million bill piece, by yes me, in the "Next Wave" book. Some of you already have read it. That's cool.

And Esquire writer Mike Sager's explanation of how he hunted for the right person for his story about an ugly person living in Los Angeles. The city of beautiful people.

Yeah, an ugly guy. I remember reading this story when it came out and thinking, how did he ever make that approach? "Hi, you're ugly. Want to be in a story about that?"

And it's important to you all because it's something we've talked about a lot recently. How to shop for the right person to tell your story. You start with the notion that you want to do a story on some idea, some notion, some statistic -- and you look for the right person to tell that story.

It's important and difficult.

Be prepared to talk about it.

And you also should read -- at least several paragraphs, to understand what the story -- the original article.

Beginnings and Endings and other things

Beginnings and Endings

Finding the right hook to keep the reader

Kickers: Why they matter more than leads

Vonnegut and Ira Glass on the shape of stories

From newspaper feature story to Oscar winner

Joelle points out that the movie "Dallas Buyers Club" -- winner of three Oscars on Sunday night, including best actor and best supporting actor -- started out as a narrative feature story in The
Dallas Morning News.

The feature story can be found here. And the story of how Hollywood came calling is here.

This is not that unusual -- lots of great pieces of journalism end up on the silver screen.


Off the top of my head, the one that comes to mind is Argo -- it began as a feature in Wired magazine and became a film with Ben Affleck, and a winner of three Oscars too.

Also, Adaption was originally a New Yorker story "The Orchard Thief" -- and that bit is worked into the movie version.

What's due for next class

We are getting close to being finished with our narratives. The stories were going to be due next class. But it was clear that everyone needed more time. Next class, March 6, come prepared to talk about your stories and how very close you are to being done with the reporting. You might even have started writing.

You must receive approval from me of your story topic. Everyone should have a finalized story topic approved by me before class on March 6.

The following week is spring break. So your written, double-spaced narrative feature is due to me on Monday, March 17. Email it to me sometime on Monday. Your story on an approved topic should be 1,500-2,000 words. You will have a chance to revise.

Feel free to freak out. And feel free to email me with questions, concerns. You can do this. I will help you.

So due for class March 6:

- Finalized story topic
- Read Chapter 9.
- "Lost in the Waves" in "Next Waves"
- Something else, maybe, that I'll post later in the week.

Non-required reading: $5 toast

We talked about this story in class. It's an interesting profile, a story born out of a trend.

Other feature story types

Week 7

Examining Other Feature Types

Trend Stories, Rule of 3, How to Identify

What's due for next class, Feb. 27

We talked about your narrative story/profiles ideas. Those of you who came to class -- yes, I'm calling out those students not in class and reminding them they are still responsible for the work they missed -- have some direction on which stories you're going to pursue. Because, very likely, a narrative/profile story of some kind will be due before class on March 6. This next week NEEDS to be spent interviewing and spending time reporting and researching your piece. You should have zeroed in on your story, talked to that person, and hopefully spent some appreciable time with them, writing all of that down in your notebook. We will discuss the reporting next class. And then you will begin writing. Game on. If you have not made decent progress on your profile by Monday, I suggest you email me. You should begin panicking, because panic is good for the writer's soul -- it makes you act. Nothing like a deadline to get you out of the chair and into the reporting frame-of-mind.

Also:

- Read Chapter 6.

- In "Next Wave," read "Introduction: The New Masters" (it's short) and "Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die" and "The Unspeakable Choice." The first story is a rapid-fire action piece, entirely reconstructed. Think about how he got those details, since he wasn't there when it went down. (Clue: It was filmed for a TV show.) The second story unfolds mostly before the reporter's eyes -- and it takes an abstract idea and makes it concrete.

Non-required reading: The Dark Power of Fraternities

We talked briefly about this Atlantic story in class yesterday. The lede is great. But the story quickly devolves into a think piece full of abstractions and policy and non-concrete discussions. Which is fine, if limited. But the excitement and interest generated by the lede's full-of-voice writing and great details is largely missing deeper in the story.

Your story ideas!

Ladder, explained in detail

Ladder of Abstraction

By Roy Peter Clark

Poynter Institute

Good writers move up and down the ladder of abstraction. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like "freedom" and "literacy." Beware of the middle, the rungs of the ladder where bureaucracy and public policy lurk. In that place, teachers are referred to as "instructional units."

The ladder of abstraction remains one of the most useful models of thinking and writing ever invented. Popularized by S.I. Hayakawa in his 1939 book "Language in Action," the ladder has been adopted and adapted in hundreds of ways to help people think clearly and express meaning.

The easiest way to make sense of this tool is to begin with its name: The ladder of abstraction. That name contains two nouns. The first is "ladder," a specific tool you can see, hold in your hands, and climb. It involves the senses. You can do things with it. Put it against a tree to rescue your cat Voodoo. The bottom of the ladder rests on concrete language. Concrete is hard, which is why when you fall off the ladder from a high place you might break your leg.

The second word is "abstraction." You can't eat it or smell it or measure it. It is not easy to use as an example. It appeals not to the senses, but to the intellect. It is an idea that cries out for exemplification.

An old essay by John Updike begins, "We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements." That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion? The answer is in his second sentence: "Consider the beer can." To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. "Pop-top" and "beer" are at the bottom of the ladder, "aesthetic experience" at the top.

We learned this language lesson in kindergarten when we played Show and Tell. When we showed the class our 1957 Mickey Mantle baseball card, we were at the bottom of the ladder. When we told the class about what a great season Mickey had in 1956, we started climbing to the top of the ladder, toward the meaning of "greatness."

Let's imagine an education reporter covering the local school board. Perhaps the topic of discussion is a new reading curriculum. The reporter is unlikely to hear conversation about little Bessie Jones, a third-grader in Mrs. Griffith's class at Gulfport Elementary, who will have to repeat the third grade because she failed the state reading test. Bessie cried when her mother showed her the test results.

Nor are you likely to hear school board members ascending to the top of the ladder to discuss "the importance of critical literacy in education, vocation, and citizenship."

The language of the school board may be stuck in the middle of the ladder: "How many instructional units will be necessary to carry out the scope and sequence of this curriculum?" an educational expert may ask. Carolyn Matalene, a great writing teacher from South Carolina, taught me that when reporters write prose the reader can neither see nor understand, they are often trapped halfway up the ladder.

Let's look at how some good writers move up and down the ladder. Consider this lead by Jonathan Bor on a heart transplant operation: "A healthy 17-year-old heart pumped the gift of life through 34-year-old Bruce Murray Friday, following a four-hour transplant operation that doctors said went without a hitch." That heart is at the bottom of the ladder — there is no other heart like it in the world — but the blood that it pumps signifies a higher meaning, "the gift of life." Such movements up the ladder create a lift-off of understanding, an effect some writers call "altitude."

One of America's great baseball writers, Thomas Boswell, wrote this essay on the aging of athletes:

The cleanup crews come at midnight, creeping into the ghostly quarter-light of empty ballparks with their slow-sweeping brooms and languorous, sluicing hoses. All season, they remove the inanimate refuse of a game. Now, in the dwindling days of September and October, they come to collect baseball souls.

Age is the sweeper, injury his broom.

Mixed among the burst beer cups and the mustard-smeared wrappers headed for the trash heap, we find old friends who are being consigned to the dust bin of baseball's history.

The abstract "inanimate refuse" soon becomes visible as "burst beer cups" and "mustard-smeared wrappers." And those cleanup crews with their very real brooms and hoses transmogrify into grim reapers in search of baseball souls.

Metaphor and simile help us to understand abstractions through comparison with concrete things.

"Civilization is a stream with banks," wrote Will Durant, working both ends of the ladder. "The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river."

Story structure

Week 6

Story Structure

Ladder of Abstraction

Why thinking is more important than writing

Non-required reading: Famous writer on getting really old

Roger Angell, a well-known author and New Yorker writer, penned a piece about getting old. It's a personal essay. And it's quite good -- lots of writers are suggesting it -- I've only gotten through half of it so far. (And hat-tip to Joelle for suggesting I post this on the blog!)

Notice the sharp use of imagery, such as here where he describes how his mind is slowing down:

My conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I’ve learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence, the one coming up, to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the landscape up there. If he sends back a warning, I’ll pause meaningfully, duh, until something else comes to mind.

That's vivid. That's showing. Would love to know what you all saw in the piece that struck you.

How not to conduct an interview

I happened to see this last night during the Olympics coverage. I immediately cringed. 

Profile examples

***********
Reckless Again - Clint Eastwood After 70
Parade Magazine, December 2008
by Gail Sheehy

Required reading

Jimmy Breslin wrote about the guy who dug John F. Kennedy's grave.

It's amazing.

This is the lead -- (notice the attention to the tiniest details. What he wore. What he ate for breakfast. His wife's name. His boss' name....) 

Washington -- Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from Mazo Kawalchik, who is the foreman of the gravediggers at Arlington National Cemetery, which is where Pollard works for a living. “Polly, could you please be here by eleven o’clock this morning?” Kawalchik asked. “I guess you know what it’s for.” Pollard did. He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Read the rest here OR here.

Week 5 tips

Week 5/ The Art of the Interview & Profiles

How to listen and how to really hear

What makes a good profile?

A story with a beginning, middle and end

Running in tomorrow's Tampa Bay Times ...

Please at least skim these essays before class Thursday

And as you read these, or skim them, be thinking about:
- What is the beginning, middle and end?
- What is the story?
- What is the action?
- What is being shown to me, the reader? And what is being told?

Think about structure and details and showing vs. telling.

Long-form stories are hits with readers

Interesting story about how the Indianapolis Star had a long article do massive traffic:

"The exorcisms of Latoya Ammons," a 5,300-word feature by investigative reporter Marisa Kwiatkowski, has become one of the most widely read pieces in the paper's history since it was published last month, according to Jeff Taylor, the Star's editor and VP-news. But even as the story continues to rack up social shares to make BuzzFeed jealous, including 62,000 on Facebook, the paper may find more luck cashing in via Hollywood than on Madison Avenue.

Also of note:

Either way, long-form works of journalism such as "The exorcism of Latoya Ammons" is becoming more attractive to publishers, including digital-only players such as BuzzFeed and Business Insider, as they seek to build engagement with readers and show social media sites like Facebook that their content is high quality. 

Your story ideas

Finding your voice

Finding your voice

Do you all want stuff on paper?

We can discuss in class.

A profile in audio

This is not a narrative. Not at first glance.

But listen to this Storycorps story about a mentally disabled mom and her daughter.
It is three minutes long.
It's mom and daughter talking, telling the story.
And it is told with a beginning, middle and end.

It begins with mom giving birth, her hopes and fears.
And then the trial and tribulations they faced together.
Finally, how they came to accept and love each other.

Note: They use scenes to show what they mean. Like the daughter describing how she tried to prepare a teacher to meet her mom.

Also: Have a tissue nearby. The NPR announcer needed one.  

Can we talk about....

There is a good way to ask a question. 

And not a good way.

"Can you talk about ...." has become a common opening for journalists to ask questions, especially in sports, especially at sports news conferences.

I have long hated the form. Some of you who've had me before have heard me rail about it. Well, here's a good piece about what "can you talk about ..." needs to stop.

Non-required reading

So that meth story we talked about in class ran Sunday. You can read it here.

Don't forget -- 5 story ideas to me by end of day Tuesday.

What's due next time

So read Chapter 3 in the textbook.

Read also these stories -- printing them out might be best for us to discuss. But be prepared. Heck, there might be a reading quiz.

On the run from everything but each other
A Frantic Search
Life at $7.25 an hour

And due via email to me tcfrankel @ gmail-dot-com by next Wednesday (so sent BEFORE 11:59 p.m. Tuesday):

5 narrative story ideas. Maybe just a couple sentences each fleshing them out. Review this tips list for recalling that you need to think about action, access and beginning/middle/ends.

Finding great stories off the beaten path

Finding great stories off the beaten path

Week 3 -- Where do ideas come from?

Feature article ideas / Story types/ Where do they come from?

Be one on whom nothing is lost.

                  -- advice from Henry James

Sometimes the story is different than what you think

That's what Michele Norris said recently about a story she wrote back in 1989 for The Washington Post. Norris today works for NPR. But back then she was doing a story about the crack epidemic hitting the nation's capital -- a two-part narrative about a 6-year-old boy whose mother was a crack addict.

Well, she was doing one kind of story. But she switched gears during her reporting -- and went after the best story.

You need to be open and flexible with your story ideas. Always be willing to change gears, always be alert to the sound of the story calling you.

(Interesting, too, that in this interview, a quarter century later, she is asked if she knows where Dooney is today. Disappointingly she doesn't.)