Stalking the feature story
Stalking. How to spot them. Hunt them. Find them.
* Carry a notebook. Ideas come and go. Send yourself email or text.
* Be patient. Think of yourself as being on a stakeout. Many wasted hours, except for that one crucial moment.
* Wait. Wait. Wait. Arrive early. Stay late.
* Just because you were there does not make it worthy.
* Just because you saw it does not make it worthy.
* Action seen is better than action reconstructed. That said, you can't be everywhere at once.
Avoid bad ideas. The frequent mistakes. The easy pratfalls.
* Don't dream the story too early. Report it a little. See if your initial instincts are born out. Be open-minded. Major problem can develop if you try cramming story into your original mold. Be flexible.
* But do pay attention to your initial reactions, visceral response to story. Can be a touchstone when you're wading knee-deep through reporting. Keeps your eye on the prize.
* Focus. Focus. Limit.
* Zoom in on personalities, people. Better than ideas or places. People behind the creations.
Anne Hull's address @ 2008 Elijah Lovejoy Convocation, excerpt.
Eudora Welty, who is the great Southern short story writer, was asked once to describe the sensibilities behind her stories. And while she’s not a journalist, she gave a model example, I think, of what good journalism is, and that is: “It is not my job to judge, but merely to pull the curtain back to reveal this hidden world behind it.”
And that is what I try to do with the stories I write.
When I first started out at the Post, I was going to write about the influx of migrant labor in the South, and I went to Arkansas to write about the number of Hispanics who had come to work in the poultry processing plants there. But I wanted to look at this phenomenon from the viewpoint of a white, rural, working-class person who was absolutely in awe of this blitzkrieg. They were giving their jobs over, they were kind of losing their stake in this community they felt very familiar with.
So I ended up going to this town, to DeQueen, Arkansas, and everyone said, “They’re taking over our town.” It’s kind of the common anxiety. So how do you find out if someone’s taking over your town?
You do the old-fashioned thing that any reporter would do; you go to the property-appraisers office and you ask the clerk to see the deed books for the last 10 years. And so you’re sitting in an office for probably six hours going through these heavy, leather-bound deed books, and you could see the story of the new South unfolding in those pages: Anglo surnames transferring over to Hispanic surnames. And, again, right there, was the story of the South. It only ends up being one line in the story, but it offers one brick in the building you’re trying to build.
You need a human to carry the narrative, so I needed a white guy who was in fear of losing his job. So I hung around the factory gates of the chicken plants and watched these streams of workers coming out—greasy, feathers literally coming from their boots. That’s how I met a worker named Danny, and I asked to come into his life and sit with him and report on this. This is the kind of reporting that’s not Q&A and shoving a microphone in someone’s face. It’s asking for permission to come into their lives and explain it to the reader.
What does that look like? It means sitting at a guy’s dining room table until midnight drinking coffee while he smokes and talking with him. It means being in his house at five in the morning when his alarm goes off and he marches off to the factory to pulverize chicken bones, which is what he did for seven dollars an hour. I tried to get at the sentiment of, what does it feel like to be on the receiving end of this massive immigration? And it turned out to be a portrait of his anxieties. But he didn’t have rancor toward the newcomers, he just was in awe of their ability to work—to outwork him.
I came back to the Post and I wrote this story and it published. And one of the grizzled old Washington veterans came up to me and said, “Well, that’s great, but when are you going to get up to the Hill and cover real journalism?”
And I said, “I thought I was.”
... There is no replacement for that sort of reporting. And there’s a lot of James Agees still around doing this, but they’re becoming fewer and fewer, replaced by this caffeinated society of bloggers and Twitterers who are filing dispatches from a TMobile spot at Starbucks.
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When we’re working with storytellers, we ask questions like, “What is the story in one sentence? Or even two words—what are you going from and what are you going to?”
In all forms of writing, you have to have themes. But in writing you can have many more themes. For the Moth, you really do need to have one theme for one story. Your story about going skydiving for your 50th birthday could be any of five stories, depending on what is the deeper story of your life.
The important thing in storytelling is to choose, so you have an organizing principle for your piece and you can give the audience a rope to hang onto.
-- Lea Thau, executive dir of The Moth, not-for-profit storytelling group
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