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.