Tommy Tomlinson asks: "What if you could find a real story as good as the song playing in your head?" On Nieman Storyboard, Tomlinson conducts a line-by-line analysis of what he calls the best George Jones song, "The Grand Tour," picking out elements of detail and other literary devices. "The songwriters — Norro Wilson, George Richey and Carmol Taylor — take you through the home of a destroyed relationship, guided by the man who now lives there alone."
Narratives
Characters, obstacles, rewards — those are keys to even lousy stories, Tommy Tomlinson writes at Nieman Storyboard: "What the story’s about is literally what happens in the narrative — who this character is, what goal he or she is trying to reach, what obstacle is in the way. The unique set of facts. What the story’s REALLY about is a way of saying, what’s the point? What’s the universal meaning that someone should draw from this story? What’s the lesson?"
Poynter's Roy Peter Clark writes that, like a magician, a narrative writer shouldn't disclose too much about the reporting: "Over the course of say, five minutes, that beautiful lady will disappear and be replaced by a tiger. 'How did he do that?' we wonder aloud. But since the purpose is mere entertainment, we succumb to the illusion and return to our ordinary lives. Succumbing to an illusion is, I would argue, a requirement of the successful experience of narrative."
Journalism educator Jeremy Rue takes a scalpel to the New York Times and its Pulitzer-winning feature, Snow Fall, describing how designers used techniques like animation to propel the story: "The opening animated images set the mood of the project in a similar fashion to background music setting the mood of a movie. It creates an atmosphere from the very moment the project opens. It’s important that these videos are silent and repetitive."
Tommy Tomlinson deconstructs the 1976 hit "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" for Nieman Storyboard and shows how it resembles a well-written short news story, complete with a literary hook, shifts in perspective, rising tension, and details that foreshadow the ship's tragic sinking: "He even has a nut graf! It’s not explicit, but you know the gales of November did something bad to a very big ship. That’s enough — and better than revealing everything up top."
First-person narration is never easy to do well, but longtime New Yorker writer E.B. White showed how it should be done in his personal essay, "Death of a Pig," which ran in The Atlantic in 1948. Betsy O'Donovan analyzes White's account of a farmer's loss in this Nieman Storyboard post: "White remembers (perhaps he wrote) the golden rule of first-person narration, which is to approach readers with humility and a perspective they can share."
What is a narrative? Does it require "a central character who encounters a problem, and the problem is somehow resolved?" Or is it, more broadly, "an account of connected events?" DeLene Beeland discusses that question — and how writing is like deconstructing a Jenga tower ("what we take out of our writing is just as important to the integrity and strength of a piece as what we keep in") — in a recap of a session at the just-concluded ScienceOnline2013 conference.
Kelley Benham French’s series about her child's premature birth and struggle to live wins praise from Nieman Storyboard: "Care went into every sentence but not in any precious look-at-me-I’m-a-Writer way. French’s sentences do every kind of work: They shock and lull and devastate and soothe, and at just the right moment, and in just the right way. Every sentence serves the narrative. Every sentence earned its right to be there, and belongs."
Starlee Kine from This American Life discusses what makes a story, and how one can get away, on Nieman Storyboard: "I honestly picture them like orphans, the ideas that I don’t get to. They feel like orphans that are just getting older without being adopted and they never go outside and they’re like fighting over who sleeps where and, like, showing each other the chore wheels. Their little faces are pressed against the glass, and they’re never going to go outside."
If there is one book essential to understanding John McPhee's mastery of structure, it's his triptych about environmental icon David Brower, Adam Hochschild writes on Nieman Storyboard. Hochschild marvels at how McPhee arranged Brower's three encounters, but adds a surprise: "After being awed by the engineering of Encounters with the Archdruid, I found it a revelation to learn that in McPhee’s mind the idea for the book’s structure preceded his choice of its subject."