Chapter 170: Feature or Narrative?
I wanted to step back from audiences, networks and the search for readers and return to the subject of the stories themselves. Specifically, whether a good feature story also succeeds as a narrative.
In no way do I mean to valorize narrative at the expense of features, or in any way diminish features by suggesting that they are somehow a lesser journalistic form. Features are essential to journalism, for their capacity to transport readers in place and time, to make vivid the lives of people whom readers might otherwise never encounter, and to bring color and dynamism to the reporting of events and news.
Features are the place where journalism is often at its most moving, evocative and compelling. As with profiles, features are built on reporting, on a keen eye and attentive ear which together breathe life and power to stories.
Features can be dramatic. But their success does not depend on the qualities that drama is built on: tension, mystery, a question whose answer readers want so eagerly to learn that they will commit to a story from start to finish just to find out.
I spent much of my life as a newspaper reporter and magazine writer producing features, and while I would sometimes stumble into an inherently dramatic story, I never saw drama as key to my stories’ success.
I liked to think that I was somehow writing nonfiction short stories, and did not fully appreciate what I needed to do to consistently achieve that elusive goal.
My students are in much the same position. They have just begun work – as my class does each spring – on the anthology of stories that, come May, they will have completed reporting and writing and readied to sell as a book. The organizing conceit of what we call The Memory Project may sound familiar to some of you: each student chooses a photograph of anything or anyone they like (except of themselves) and sets about reporting the story of that frozen moment.
They have about two months to report and then, if all goes according to plan, they will be ready to write.
The goal is to allow the students to experience the thrill of reporting a story they need to tell. I want them to fall in love with reporting and if they do not I hold myself accountable. Over time I found no better way to make this happen than to allow my students to become obsessed to the point of sleeplessness trying to find the story in an image that, for reasons they may not necessarily be able to articulate, they need to understand.
This group is much like my students each spring – eager, curious and ready to throw themselves in. As with previous classes, many have chosen family photos, sometimes of relatives they’ve barely known or never met. They’ve embarked on the first steps of reporting, getting a sense of the proverbial “lay of the land” which will allow them to better identify the reporting lines, and which directions to head in. They’ve begun interviewing, doing so not to gather quotes but instead by getting their subjects to tell stories that bring moments and people to life.
They have, in short, done all I’ve asked of them. But now they are struggling to see how to make their stories into narratives. I empathize.
When I was a young and even not so young journalist, I recognized that because I could write well – I know this sounds vainglorious but bear with me; it will quickly become self-denigrating – I could, in effect, hide behind color, description and the occasional deft turn of phrase. As a result, I could avoid doing what I was most reluctant to do: commit, fully and completely to the kind of simple question that would propel a drama in motion.
There is great power in such questions, and looking back, I can see that I was not comfortable wielding it. Better to suggest, be implicit, “let the reader decide.” But letting the reader decide is like telling a friend in crisis “let me know if there is anything I can do.” Your friend has enough on his or her mind without having to pause and consider how best to make use of your offer. You decide.
I thought I was deciding. But if I had to, say, distill the question animating my story into four or five words, I struggled. What if I was wrong? What if at the heart of my story was a question that did not seem quite smart enough? What if I was being too simple, too “high concept?”
We journalists like to believe that we are operating on a higher plane than, say, the people who make movies or write potboiler novels. Perhaps we are. Given the subjects we sometimes take on, we can be forgiven for lapsing into that kind of self-satisfaction. But there is a reason that people read Danielle Steel or watch cheesy movies. Those storytellers have a pact with their audiences: sit back and I will keep you reading and watching and I will keep you up well past your bedtime by posing such questions as: Who did it? Who was that guy? Why did she do what she did? And all the while, you will be asking: what happened next?
My students are still at the stage when they feel it necessary to frame their stories in such a way as to include words like policy and context. They are smart and they want their stories to be smart. And like me at their age and for years afterward, they are forgetting why they like to read or binge watch. Even as I begin each semester by asking what they’re watching on streaming – I remind them that we are living in a golden age of TV and there is so much to be learned about narrative – they will hesitate when it comes to committing to the drama in their own stories. What if they’re wrong?
Last week I gave them six stories to read, a combination of narratives, features and a fictional short story thrown in. The assignment was to read each of them for 10 minutes – roughly 2000 words. They were then free to stop, but once they did I asked them to note where and why.
It is one the basic tenets of teaching that the most enduring lessons are the ones students teach themselves. Lessons learned in the abstract tend to enter one ear and quickly exit the other. My hope was that in reading these stories, all the while thinking of their own stories, they would see what qualities drew them in and kept them riveted, what each writer did – or perhaps failed to do – to make sure they did not stop or so much as turn away.
I mentioned the assignment to a colleague who is a wonderful writer and teacher, and he pushed back on the underlying premise: features, in his view, can work as narratives, too.
Not always, I replied. Features can be a delight to read but absent the tension that drama relies upon they are something different. I told him about a conversation I’d had with one of my students who was struggling to find the drama in her story: think, I told her, of the mindful breathing technique that calls for you to breathe in for four seconds, hold your breath for seven seconds, before exhaling for five. The drama, I suggested, exists in that middle stage when you’re holding your breath, waiting. Before you can exhale.
My colleague smiled, ruefully.
My students always surprise me in which stories they love and which fail to pull them in. Years ago I stopped assigning them stories to read from start to finish because while I may have loved those stories when I discovered them, I came to see that I was imposing my tastes, my sense of what represented quality on young and wise readers with varying definitions of what worked.
So it was that there was no unanimity among my students in the stories I had sent them. Several loved a couple of narrative pieces while others stopped reading as soon as they reached the 2,000-word mark. Some loved the short story; others said they read it through only because it happened to be, well, very short.
One spoke about loving a story because of its subject and the connection to her own life; another loved the same story for entirely different reasons.
So what to make of all these opinions. First, that the students were passionate in their views. When a story worked they were swept up and it came up short they did not hesitate to turn away.
The thread that ran through the comments – both positive and negative – was the presence or absence of tension. Their responses to the stories were more visceral than intellectual. Yes, there were things to be learned – about subjects, characters, places. But what was consistently front of mind was their experience of the story. How it made them feel, in ways that were, at turns, moving, unsettling and, in one instance, so powerful that reading another story immediately after a wrenching piece felt deflating.
Features can accomplish this. Of that there is no doubt. But narratives are built on tension, on the experience, on how the story leaves you feeling.
Which is why, in the end, they are best when they begin with a simple question, one that cuts to the heart of things, and when done right, to our hearts, too.
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If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.
It is seldom, if ever, the case that one student’s problem or question is their’s alone.
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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture