Roy Peter Clark revisits the New York Times' 2013 Pulitzer winner, saying that its multimedia often got in the way of its story: "The problem is that the narrative line is interrupted, time and again, by elements that are marginal to the storytelling. Embedded in the text are tiny icons that signify the visual tools: a video, a slide show. Every time I clicked on one of these, it took me away from the story. Instead of time moving, time was frozen, so to speak."
Narratives
The Henrietta Lacks author discusses a story she wrote in 2004 about a neighbor's pack of vicious dogs in midtown Manhattan and the city's refusal to intervene even after multiple attacks. She talks about finding stories in "moments that make me stop and go, Wait … what?! … The first and most meaningful example was when I was 16 and I said to my biology teacher, Wait, what do you mean there are cells that are still alive decades after the woman they came from died?"
Beth Macy reviews the process of writing her just-released book, Factory Man, including the two weeks she she spent in the "corn crib:" "My goal had been to write a business book that did not read like a business book — something that my octogenarian mom could read in order to finally understand why so many of the once-thriving factory towns she grew up in, and near, now look like ghost towns, with soaring rates of disability, food insecurity and underemployment."
Ben Yagoda samples 11 prominent writers in a Nieman Storyboard post about ending a long story: "With each word, sentence, and paragraph, the world of possibilities is constricted, until you find yourself with one more bit to write. Even if you haven’t painted yourself into an uncomfortable corner, you have to steer between being too obvious and too enigmatic. At the same time you feel you need to leave readers with something that will move them and stick with them."
Susan Orlean annotates her 1992 Esquire feature on Colin Duffy, an ordinary New Jersey boy on the brink of puberty: "I like to use quotes sparingly, and to use them when there's a real reason to quote rather than to just write in my own voice. I like quotes that are meaningful for their content but also revealing in terms of voice, language, personality. People think I use quotes a lot, but I really don't — I only like to use them when they serve many purposes."
The New Journalism icon offers tips including "a technique that I call 'the offstage narrator.' He's just off the stage. His mind is the general mindset of the people through whose eyes you begin to see. I've done it with stock car racers, during a trial run with Junior Johnson, making a wild swing around the curve. 'Great smokin' blue gumballs! God almighty dog! There goes Junior Johnson!' Well, nobody said that. It's the atmosphere, it's the offstage narrator."
Paige Williams lists 21 stories that mention music, from Hunter S. Thompson and The Fifth Dimension to Joan Didion and Herman’s Hermits: "Mere mention of the songs and their artists enhances scene and helps establish setting, character and mood. Good journalists, as they report, notice what is playing during the road trip or the ocean cruise or the juke-joint visit or the hospital stay. The songs signal something different each time: optimism, grief, mystery, terror."
Adapting her recent talk for the D.C. Science Writers Association, Ann Finkbeiner writes about her misgivings over the use of fiction-writing techniques in nonfiction about science, especially when it comes to eliding facts to help a story: "Nonfiction arranges facts into a story, it finds the story in the facts. Readers are not in it for evocation of someone else’s world. They’re in it for the truth about the world we all must share, for understanding those facts."
At first he was put off by the advice he got from a film executive, John Capouya writes on Nieman Storyboard. But as he worked on his biography of the professional wrestler Gorgeous George, he began to learn what makes movies work: "The way screenwriters understand, exploit and tweak these elements can help us tell compelling true stories that, at least at first, don't appear on-screen. There's real craft, and real craft lessons, in the stories that unfold in the dark.
What does Arsenic and Old Lace have in common with Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle? They're both examples of Kurt Vonnegut's "Man in Hole" story shape, according to a Nieman Storyboard post. The Slaughterhouse-Five author developed his story-shapes model as a master's thesis at the University of Chicago, but it was rejected. It later found new life in a YouTube video and the Nieman post includes interpretations in both text and graphic form.