for minute details on what it’s like living in a car or what it’s like to read in front of a classroom but when it’s on paper, it flows organically. Details. Details. Get those and the story comes alive.”
▸ Keep talking until you find a major conflict. Once this person starts talking, listen for visual markers and other specific details that will enable you to paint the story more clearly. If this information is not supplied, ask for it: “What was the weather like?” “Where were you standing?” “Describe the trail you ran on.” “What did the heat feel like?” There are a million ways to write a profile or feature, but there is really one primary factor that drives these stories—conflict. So go find it. Your readers will be most thankful.
Write
Start with something the reader doesn’t know, says Glenn Stout, and then start teaching your audience. In “Elegy of a Race Car Driver,” for example, Markovich begins by revealing Dick Trickle’s final conversation recorded when he called a 911 operator before committing suicide.
Then, look for potential themes. Dave Sheinin, in “A Wonderful Life,” equates the instinctual way that Dusty Baker cooks collard greens to the Nationals manager’s approach to guiding a baseball team.
▸ For longer pieces, such as the 3,000-plus word “A Wonderful Life,” Sheinin prefers to create multiple sections, which essentially serve as mini-chapters. This enables a writer to more easily dive into multiple scenes and topics. The start and end of a story are most important, says Sheinin, but these other sections are equally important, enabling a writer to move toward a conclusion. “I tend to write top to bottom and tend to know the ending,” Sheinin says, “and then I try to get there.” Everything in the middle, he adds, is a means to this end.
▸ Jenkins put more emphasis on a feature’s opening paragraphs: “As long as I have a beginning, everything else will come.” Processes change among writers.
▸ Before you write, reduce your story to one or two sentences. If you have difficulty doing this, you’ll probably struggle to organize and to structure the story. Some writers, though, prefer to write more organically, letting ideas grow along the way—a method that can be both exciting and frustrating, depending on your level of writing and amount of research. Even if you use this second approach, go back and determine if you included a sentence or two that can serve as a nut graf. If not, write a few sentences and determine how this affects your story. Don’t be afraid to completely revamp, revise, move, or delete large chunks of the story. In fact, it would be shocking if you did not make such changes.
▸ Explain everything so readers won’t constantly have to look for clarification. So learn everything you can about the physics of a knuckleball, for example, before you write about this pitch’s sometimes unpredictable, fluttering movement. If you send readers to search engines, they probably won’t come back. Says Stout: “The temptation for readers to go to Google is there 100 percent of the time.”
▸ Write about places where most fans or other reporters rarely go. Yahoo! sportswriter Jeff Passan, for example, left the press box at Wrigley Field during Game 3 of the National League Division Series in 1985 to tell the stories of the six fans in the bleachers who caught home run balls hit by Cubs players, turning the game story into a feature story instead of a recitation of facts surrounding Chicago’s record-setting power performance in the 8–6 victory over the Cardinals.
▸ Think mobile, as in an audience reading these features on smartphones who pause at the bottom of the screen deciding whether to swipe ahead for another few paragraphs. As you revise, make sure every sentence has something that is instructive, entertaining, or newsworthy; otherwise even one small, uninteresting, poorly scripted section of a larger story can send readers headed elsewhere.
▸ Jenkins prefers not to start writing until he’s completed the reporting process, because he never knows what’s going to turn up late. He then reviews all of his notes, placing them on his desk where he decides what to include in the story.
Learn Storytelling Techniques
Journalists can’t make things up. But they can borrow elements used by screenwriters, playwrights, and novelists, approaches used in books as varied as War and Peace or The House at Pooh Corner.
Conflict
Conflict is the key to storytelling. In games, a player or team wants to beat another. Off the field, a player may be working to improve despite some physical ailments, or a coach could be trying unusual approaches to help the team win. Perhaps a young girl wants to be a professional boxer, even though females usually don’t get that opportunity. Or the story could be about a man who got a lung transplant after a young athlete committed suicide—and how both the girls’ father and recipient of the lung received their “second wind” as they learned how to run and breathe again in their own ways. If you cannot find the conflict, you probably don’t have a story.
Pamela Colloff, who wrote the story about the fired high school basketball coach and whose work has been featured in The Best American Sports Writing series, says the main conflict should be revealed early in any feature. “It’s important to establish what the stakes are in the story pretty early on,” Colloff says. “I’m not talking about a nut graf. I’m talking about giving the reader a reason to read the story. Who cares about a girls’ basketball coach in some small town in Texas? The writer must establish early on why the story’s main character is worthy of the reader’s time.”
Character
Your main character (or protagonist) needs to be a fully developed person, someone literary critics would call dynamic or complex—not flat and simple. Reveal this person through actions, physical description, dialogue, and comments by others. Do not paint this person as all good or all bad. We are all illogical, inconsistent people. There’s nothing wrong with revealing this, if these points are relevant. Speak to as many people as possible to learn about this person.
Dave Hyde uses several techniques to define his protagonist, the aloof, reclusive NFL player, in his story “Where’s Jake Scott?” In this passage, Hyde first uses physical description, and then a mixture of action and dialogue to further introduce the Super Bowl VIII most valuable player.
At 61, he’s still trim. He’s completely bald. Oversized glasses cover his face like two storm windows. And he’s smiling, thank God. I double-check to be sure.
“Hi, how you doing?’’ he says.
He shakes hands. He talks in a soft, friendly voice still rooted in Georgia. He says, “I’m not hard to find.” He says, “I don’t want a story written.” He says, “If you’d ask questions, then I’d have to tell the truth.” He says, “I live the simplest life you can imagine—wake up every day and decide whether to golf, fish or have a drink.”
From this front porch, the Pacific peeks through palm trees across the quiet road. Warm air rides in on a noonday breeze. Scott puts one foot up on the railing and allows the conversation to drift. He tells how his home sat alone on this road when he arrived in 1982. Now the world has joined him. A small place beside him just sold for $1.9 million. A big lot across the road, against the ocean, went for $29 million.
He says, “That’s how it goes.” He says, “Beautiful here, isn’t it?” He says, “Too bad my boat just had its propeller damaged or I’d take you out fishing—just you and me, not
