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Everything you need to know about storytelling, in 5 minutes

by Tommy Tomlinson | May 24, 2013
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I spoke to the Public Relations Society of America’s Charlotte chapter on Wednesday. They’re a good group. Sometimes I speak off the top of my head at this sort of thing, but this time I actually wrote out some thoughts, so I thought I’d post them in the spirit of Austin Kleon’s “show your work” idea. If you do any kind of storytelling for a living, these are probably basic ideas … but maybe not.

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Tomlinson

Thanks for having me here today. I want this to be more of a conversation than a speech. I don’t need much time for a speech, because today I’m going to teach you everything you need to know about storytelling in five minutes.

But first I want to tell you a little story.

My wife (Alix Felsing, Storyboard’s copyeditor) has this uncanny gift for finding the worst possible movie on TV at any given moment. The other night she landed on the SyFy channel, on this movie called Collision Earth.

I’m gonna try to come up with a quick synopsis that does this movie justice.

The event that gets the action going is a solar flare so powerful that it knocks the planet Mercury out of its orbit and sends it hurtling toward Earth. This would be bad.

Along with knocking Mercury out of its orbit, somehow this solar flare also magnetized Mercury, so as it heads for Earth, cars and stuff start flying into the air to meet it.

There’s ONE scientist who knows how to fix this. In fact he has built this giant battering ram in space for just this situation. But for reasons I never did quite follow, this scientist was fired from NASA years before, and his giant battering ram was unfinished and left out in space to rot, and now, of course, NOBODY WILL LISTEN TO HIM.

It just so happens that this disgraced scientist’s wife is an astronaut whose spacecraft is — you won’t believe this — orbiting Mercury. But the solar flare hit the ship so hard that a little while later, the other astronaut on board keels over and dies.

So he’s on the ground trying to save Earth, and she’s up in space trying to save Earth, and they’re actually talking to each other via ham radio — I don’t even wanna get into how THAT happened.

There’s not nearly enough time to tell you all the ways this movie is ludicrous, so I’ll give you just two:

One, this giant magnetized planet that’s flying toward us is just sucking cars off the earth, EXCEPT when the disgraced scientist needs a car to get somewhere; then his car stays on the ground just fine, even as other cars are being sucked off the planet right in front of him.

And two, this astronaut up there, when she needs to move around the spaceship, she doesn’t float through the capsule in zero gravity … she just gets up and walks around like she’s at the mall.

I have only scratched the surface of how stupid on every level this movie is. But we watched the damn thing all the way to the end. When it was over, I looked at my wife and said, “Why did we do that?” But the truth is, I knew why.

And here’s where I tell you everything you need to know about storytelling in five minutes.

First, I’m gonna draw three objects.

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This is a sympathetic character. It’s probably someone you like, but at the very least it’s someone you’re emotionally invested in. You care what happens to this person.

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This is a hurdle. It’s an obstacle of some kind — could be a bad guy, could be a physical challenge, could be some sort of internal emotional demon.

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And this is the pot of gold — some kind of goal, some kind of reward, physical or emotional or whatever.

A story is the journey of this character you care about, confronting and dealing with this obstacle, to reach this pot of gold.

In addition to these three pictures, you need to answer two questions:

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Writing a tornado narrative, with Esquire’s Luke Dittrich

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The news out of Moore, Okla., couldn’t help remind us of the historic tornado in Joplin, Mo., and of one narrative in particular: Luke Dittrich’s National Magazine Award-winning Esquire piece on how a group of strangers survived by crowding into a convenience store cooler. The scenario, which happened two years ago yesterday, was echoed this week at Plaza Towers Elementary, where 70 to 80 children survived by taking cover with their teachers in a bathroom. Dittrich visited the Nieman Foundation last year to talk about his piece, “Heavenly Father!…,” as part of the Nieman Narrative speaker series. Dittrich’s story was so strong partly because he recognized the opportunity for narrative. From a gargantuan topic (tornado), he extracted Story (what happened to a specific set of people caught in a specific shared circumstance). The piece works because it contains the key narrative elements, including:

Arc. The story has a natural beginning, middle, and end. The people went into the cooler, helped each other survive, and then returned to their lives. Dittrich, in his Nieman talk: 

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courtesy Esquire

I was drawn to the cooler because it’s so tightly focused – it’s a very tight space with a bunch of people crammed inside, in the dark. I liked the idea of simplifying it as much as possible. The thing that made it easier was the fact that there weren’t two dozen disconnected individuals in there; there were maybe six or seven smaller units. My biggest fear was that (readers) were gonna lose track of who’s who. Approaching it as family units or as friend units, or as people who were helping each other, helped me try to keep it as comprehensible as possible.

Characters. Strong narratives usually depend on a strong leading character or characters—someone who faces a challenge and then either surmounts it or fails. Dittrich tracked down every person from the cooler and then:

I first tell them to just give me a little backstory – who are ya and what do you do? How long have you been around here? Where do you come from? In this case I had them start with what happened as best they could remember from the moment they woke up that morning to the end of the day, and to just walk me through every single thing they could remember about that day.

Dittrich

Dittrich

Detail/description. Dittrich went so far as to have the people from the Fastrip cooler sketch out everyone’s places as best they could recollect, to better “see” the scene and to make sure the details lined up:

I got anybody that could to sketch out who was around them. When I got them finally together at the site of the Fastrip I got them to arrange themselves as they were, as they were crouched down and draped over each other, so I could picture it in my head.

To read the whole conversation with Dittrich, about the tornado and other stories, go here.

 

by Paige Williams | May 23, 2013 | posted in #longreads, narrative news, narrative speaker series | comments (0)
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Annotation Tuesday! Amy Wallace and one of “the most despised and feared” men in Hollywood

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When Amy Wallace profiled then-Variety editor Peter Bart for Los Angeles magazine, she took on issues of access, personality, misdirection, industry politics, journalism and retaliation. To write about a guy who’s been called “the most hated man in Hollywood” demands guts and patience. To pull it off as she did requires a certain tact and grace. Wallace, an expert on the psychology of Hollywood, lifts the veil for us here in this installment of “Annotation Tuesday!” by taking us line by line through “Hollywood’s Information Man,” which is as much about how journalists cover the filmmaking industry as it’s about how Bart operated about town.

Elon Green

Green

Our guest annotator is Elon Green, who writes for The Awl and contributes to Longform.org. His comments are in blue, Wallace’s in green. He starts us off with a couple of questions for Wallace:

Storyboard: Not long ago, you told us, “A profile seeks to capture the essence—the point—of the person being profiled, and that is done, often, through narrative.” Does the narrative become more important when, as is the case with Peter Bart, the essence seems so elusive?

Amy Wallace: I guess so, though a more important distinction in this story was that the narrative was double-barreled. There were the stories about Bart moving through the world of Hollywood. But there were also the stories that detailed my personal interactions with Bart. As I searched for the essence of Bart, I realized—and this realization came during the writing process, late in the game—that he was a man who wielded enormous power in Hollywood in large part because his essence was elusive. He refused to be pegged. He wore many hats, and never failed to exploit the advantages that came with that shape-shifting ability. And, importantly, I realized that I had a lot of first-person experience with him that had allowed me to witness the way he wielded power—by exerting it on me. This was at a time when it seemed every profile in Vanity Fair started with the writer detailing what they had eaten for lunch during an interview with Meg Ryan, and for that reason I resisted appearing in the piece for a long time. But then I realized that the way Bart was working me was a window into how he worked everyone. And once I realized that, punctuating the piece with our conversations really made sense.

Amy Wallace

Amy Wallace

This story is now 12 years old. What were you like back then? How do you imagine Bart saw you?

I was 38 then, so I wasn’t a kid. I had a lot of experience as a newspaper reporter. But I think one key thing that defined the way Bart saw me was that I had left newspapers to become a full-time magazine writer. I was shifting gears and trying to excel in a new form. And he already wrote for magazines—he had a regular column in GQ. He knew that, if he wished, he could help me break into national magazines and directly said as much (it’s in the piece). The power dynamic—him established, me striving—was key to the way he interacted with me.

“Hollywood’s Information Man“
By Amy Wallace
Los Angeles magazine
9.1.01

Peter Bart is on the phone, and he’s threatening to sue.

“I really take umbrage at the gotcha nature of your interrogation,” he says. His voice is taut. I can’t see his knees, but I’m sure at least one is twitching. <This is great. It’s not just vivid description; it lets the reader know you have met Peter. Whatever the story will be, it is not a write-around. Was the Los Angeles magazine name a help or a hindrance in persuading Bart to cooperate? And was access necessary?/eg Access was key to this story, and I explicitly told Bart that I wouldn’t do the piece without it. My original idea for the story was that the world of Hollywood’s trade papers fascinated me and I thought Bart was a great main character through which to tell that story. He was smart, had worked inside and outside the studios, had been a journalist and written books–through him I would pull back the curtain and explain the odd symbiotic role the trades played then in the town they supposedly merely covered. I met with Bart for lunch and told him I wanted to write “a New Yorker-style profile” of him. I said I wanted him to think about it overnight and not tell me until the next day, because if he said yes, I could guarantee he was going to get sick of me. I told him I was going to read every word he’d ever written (not a small task), show up at every public event he headlined, and be a fly on the wall in as many situations as he would allow. The next morning he called and said, “Let’s do it.” As for the twitching knee detail—I ended up spending so much time with Bart in so many circumstances that I felt certain about the knee twitching. This was an important beginning because it not only said that I’d met him/spent time with him, it signaled to readers that I’d spent SO much time with him that I felt that I knew him well. Whatever was coming, it was going to be a deeply reported piece./aw

Bart, the editor-in-chief of Variety, the entertainment industry’s dominant newspaper, is accustomed to being in charge. Studio heads woo him; strivers kiss his ass. Everyone wants his insight and his wisdom—or prominent placement in Variety’s big, glossy pages. In his weekly column, “The Back Lot,” he alternately strokes and scolds moguls and movie stars, addressing them by their first names. When Bart telephones the powerful, he is put right through. Now he’s calling me.

“I think to plunk documents out of context,” he says, “on people whose lives are as busy as yours or mine is a little unfair. This is not consistent with the access and cooperation I have afforded you.”

Over several months I have encountered a dizzying variety of Peters. I have spent many hours with Charming Peter, who is smart, funny, fierce. I have gotten to know Judgmental Peter, who loves to size up others. I’ve met Crude Peter, Brilliant Peter, Hypocritical Peter, Loyal Peter.

Bart calls himself “Zelig-like.” A setter of rules who hates to follow them, a lover of labels who resents being characterized, a seeker of the truth who doesn’t always tell it, Bart believes he is immune to the conflicts that derail lesser men. It’s one of the things that place him among the most despised and feared people in Hollywood. I listen to him speaking now. It’s a Peter I’ve never met.

“When you’re in public life, people attack you,” Intimidating Peter tells me. “But I’m taken aback by a bogus document suddenly being slammed on the desk. I’ll send you a note saying I will sue you, which I sure as hell will.” <The opening ends here. You italicized it. Could you tell me about that? It reads like a pre-credit sequence. And did Bart ever send you that note?/eg He never sent me that note, though we did have a phone conversation after the piece appeared. But I’ll get to that later. As I said in response to your opening questions, when I realized that Bart’s interactions with me were relevant and revelatory, I started to look for ways to use them. And it occurred to me that they could become the scaffolding for the piece./aw
IF YOU ARE A DOCTOR OR A GROCER or an airline pilot with no ties to the business that produces America’s number-one export—entertainment—you probably have never heard of Peter Bart. But if you are among the 70,000 people in Los Angeles, New York, and around the world who can’t start the day without knowing which big-name movie director just got a two-picture deal, Bart is an institution. <This is smart. It’s an acknowledgement that you, the reader, most likely have no reason to care about Peter Bart. But I’m going to make you./eg Thanks. Yes, this was key to the piece. Bart was a huge power broker in Hollywood, but most people outside of the entertainment business had never heard of him. I had to make a case for why they should read 13,000 words./aw

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by Paige Williams | May 21, 2013 | posted in #longreads, annotation tuesday! | comments (3)
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Work the problem: Story regret

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Our “Work the problem” series continues with a psychological situation that every writer faces:

How do you make peace with stories you wish you’d done differently?

Fielding this one is Esquire legend Tom Junod, who lightly revisited his controversial 2007 Angelina Jolie profile this week after Jolie revealed, in an op-ed piece in Tuesday’s New York Times, news about a preventative double mastectomy. Looking at the hindsight issue more generally, Junod tells Storyboard:

Image 5I don’t really go in for self-flagellation. Or, rather: I flagellate myself so enthusiastically while writing my stories that I don’t have the time or the energy to flagellate myself once they’re done. In general, I don’t divide stories into Good and Bad or Perfect and Imperfect—I divide them as Finished and Unfinished.  The Finished stories are just that—stories that seemed to settle into final form before they were shipped to the printer. The Unfinished stories are the stories that were, in some way, taken away from me before they were finalized. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t work hard at them and (Esquire editor) David (Granger) didn’t devote his full attention to them; there’s nothing I’ve published in Esquire that hasn’t been gone over, by everyone, 10 or 20 times.

Unfinished stories are just stories that fall away from some Platonic ideal of what they might have been. In general, however, I’ve written so many more Unfinished stories than Finished ones—which is to say, I’ve written so many more stories that bear the marks of violent struggle, and were delivered by Caesarean rather than naturally. I’m quite aware when stories are coming easily and when they’re not, and when they’re not, I walk around with a rather low opinion of myself. But a writer is like a quarterback or a relief pitcher: You have to be able to put the bad throws behind you, or you can’t do the job.

I don’t flagellate myself because I’m aware that it would be crippling to flagellate myself, and the one thing I know beyond anything else is that I can’t afford to cripple myself. The other thing I know is that an Unfinished story is not necessarily a bad one, and neither is a story that shows itself to be born in struggle (see Leonardo DiCaprio). Hell, even “bad” stories are not necessarily bad ones. I remember walking into a dinner party after Slate called the Angelina profile the Worst Celebrity Profile of All Time. My arrival was greeted with silence; people did not know what to say. So I brought it up, not just to ease the tension but also because I was, like my editor, perversely proud of being so honored, knowing that you can’t hope to write the Best Celebrity Profile of All Time unless you are absolutely prepared to write the Worst. I’m not in this business because I expect to be admired but rather because I want the freedom to say what I want to say and get some kind of reaction for saying it, so if I can’t enjoy the fact that Slate devoted 2,500 words to the Angelina profile then I’ve lost something of myself that I desperately need to preserve in order to write the way I want to write. The great vice of journalism in the age of social media is not its recklessness but rather its headlong rush for respectability—its self-conscious desire to please an audience of peers rather than an audience of readers—and the first step towards respectability is regret.

Several years ago, I interviewed Gong Show host Chuck Barris and he told me that anyone who says they don’t have any regrets is either a liar or a psychopath. And he’s right—but only about life. Not about journalism. As a journalist, I don’t just (metaphorically) sing “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” after I write my stories. I make myself sing it, even though it’s a damned hard song to sing.

For “Work the problem” archives, go here. Got a narrative issue you’d like help resolving? Email us at contact_us@niemanstoryboard.org and we’ll try to get you an expert answer.

by Paige Williams | May 17, 2013 | posted in tips, work the problem | comments (0)
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Live chat: the Washington Post’s “The Prophets of Oak Ridge”

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Welcome to the Notable Narrative live chat with the Washington Post‘s Dan Zak, author of “The Prophets of Oak Ridge,” the saga of three peace activists, including an 82-year-old nun, who breached security at the U.S. nuclear-weapons facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Also joining us is David Beard, the Post‘s director of digital content. We chose “Prophets” as our latest Notable Narrative for its storytelling and online presentation, which as of this week includes an e-book. You can read about that here. Jump in anytime with your questions—the Post team will start answering them at 11 a.m.

by Paige Williams | May 16, 2013 | posted in #longreads, live chats | comments (0)
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Notable Narrative: “The Prophets of Oak Ridge”

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Our latest Notable Narrative: “The Prophets of Oak Ridge,” Dan Zak’s 9,448-word Washington Post project—and, as of this morning, e-book—about a house painter, a drifter and an 82-year-old nun who breached the perimeter at the Y-12 National Security Complex, which produces nuclear weapons in East Tennessee. We’ll be hosting a live chat with Zak about the multimedia project this Thursday at 11 a.m., so please join us. David Beard, the Post‘s director of digital content, will also be with us, to talk about what the staff learned from producing two big digital projects back to back.

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Photo by Linda Davidson, courtesy Washington Post

The story: The activists wanted to make their point with fence cutters, graffiti, protest songs, and the thawed blood of a colleague who died in 2008 but hoped to “join” one last mission. Zak tells their story but also that of Oak Ridge, Tenn., built by the federal government as a bomb-making town. “Though you haven’t needed a badge to get into the town since 1949, Oak Ridge’s soul hasn’t changed,” he writes. “It’s still a company town, and the company is the government, and the business is bombs.” The facility housed “enough radioactive material to fuel over 10,000 nuclear bombs, which would end civilization many times over,” material used in warheads renovation programs that could take 25 years and cost $20 billion. The activists, who were convicted last week of injuring the national defense and damaging government property, each took different paths into custody. There’s riveting writing in Zak’s tale—

The lights of the Antichrist flickered through the trees.

The drifter prayed.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. For all the glory is yours, and on the last day Jesus will come like this, like a thief in the night, and the warmongering United States will fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy by beating its swords into plowshares.

He had duct-taped the head of his flashlight to reduce the beam to a sliver. On the downward slope of Pine Ridge, he moved in front of the nun, clearing branches and stones from her path. He was just a frail earthen vessel, he believed, but she was a daughter of God. He was her bodyguard.

On his head was a construction hat painted light blue, with “UN” marked on the front. On his breath was the stink of Top brand tobacco. In their backpacks, he and the nun carried twine, matches, candles, a Bible, three hammers, six cans of spray paint, three protest banners, copies of a letter they wished to deliver to Y-12 employees and two emblems of sustenance — a packet of cucumber seeds and a fresh-baked loaf of bread with a cross molded into the top.

And six baby bottles of human blood.

—and the presentation is beautiful, clean and striking. The Post ran the story on its website magazine style. Illustrations depicted the break-in, and still photos and a slideshow worked as secondary art. The 14 chapter titles alone tell a story: “Mission,” “‘…and the Earth Will Shake’” and “Sabotage.” Have a read, and join us back here on Thursday, to talk about how this project came together.

 

by Paige Williams | May 14, 2013 | posted in #longreads, notable narratives | comments (1)

How’s it going with The Big Round Table and other narrative ventures, Michael Shapiro?

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As if longtime Columbia J-school professor Michael Shapiro didn’t already have enough to do, with Big Round Table launching in September: Yesterday he put 17 of his students’ stories online in a pay-what-you want experiment. Project Wordsworth runs for the next week. The idea intrigues us* and we’re interested to see what will happen. As of this morning Project Wordsworth had seen 5,000 page views and the writers, Shapiro said, had earned more than $1,000. Excerpts from a few of the stories:

W.125th to 99 Madison Avenue: 30 minutes on the 1 and N trains according to Google, which was five minutes off. Apparently, Google doesn’t account for 4 inch heels in their walking and transfer time estimations. Seat: Yes. Ambiance: 4. Time in transit: 35 minutes. The OpenData NYC meet-up was hosted at ThoughtWorks, one of the many Manhattan tech start-ups indistinguishable from each other with their fridges full of beers and vague mission statements. ThoughtWorks was unusual only in that its offices were in Midtown rather than the downtown corridor of the original “Silicon Alley.” (from “The Little Blue Book: The Worlds of Commuting Obsessives,” by Madeline K.B. Ross)

Sitting on a plastic bed in the in-patient/out-patient wing of the Weinberg Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins with an IV connected to a catheter that had been implanted in my chest, things were looking up. It was 2008 and I was 28 years old, and due to a recent battery of high-dose chemotherapy that had left me with maybe one white blood cell, which I’d named Melvin, I had to wear one of those surgeon’s masks at all times to keep the world’s germs out of my face. Here I was, if you can imagine, bald and eyebrowless with a paper mask over my mouth, a tube coming out of my chest, the picture of cancer, and things were looking up. Scans showed that the cancer (along with just about every other cell in my body) was disappearing. (from “Healing Me Harshly,” by Keith Collins)

Kathryn Denning spends a lot of time studying scientists who think about aliens. Denning, an anthropologist at York University in Canada, is fascinated by the idea of The Other in relation to humans. Her recent research has focused on how scientists think about the evolution of intelligence in relation to hypothetical extraterrestrials, ethical difficulties and the future of the human colonization of Space. A big reason we’re so drawn to space, she told me, is “its importance in traditional culture.” We all share the experience of looking up at the stars and trying to make sense of it all. “It tends to get intertwined with the heavens and Heaven and we think of it as a place of revelations and knowledge and dreams,” Denning said. (from “Cosmic Postcards: The Adventures of an Armchair Astronaut,” by Kamakshi Ayyar)

In the days and months that followed I replayed the incident in my head over and over again. It seemed so unreal that I often questioned whether what I saw actually happened or if I dreamed it all up. What always made it real again was not the image of a man jumping but the memory of the jolt the train made as it ran over his body. I needed to know who this man was. I looked in the newspapers but found very little. I learned that his name was Dwight Brown and that he was 27 years old. He lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Then the trail dried up. It was as if this man’s trace of life vanished. I thought if I could find more about this man, meet his family and friends, I would be able to make sense of that morning. (from “The Witness,” by Mary Ann Georgantopoulos)

Screen Shot 2013-05-09 at 4.51.05 PMShapiro also gave us a status report on his larger project, The Big Round Table, a Kickstarter-funded web-based publisher of longform narrative that attempts to crowd-curate storytelling by bypassing the “gatekeepers” of publishing and posting what readers say they want to read. Stories get greenlighted by a cooperative of journalists “committed to the future of big narrative ambitious nonfiction” based on the first 1,000 words. Writers earn $1 of every sale. We talked to Shapiro last night by email. Here’s some of the discussion:

Storyboard: You went big with the pitch: “There is a revolution taking place in journalism. With it have come possibilities for writers who despaired of ever finding a way to make a living at their craft. Writers are now freed from the constraints of convention in telling their stories and from the commercial needs of editors and publishers, who determine what tales get told. That, in turn, means a new era of creativity for authors of narrative nonfiction—new writers, new stories, new audiences waiting for a friend to say, Here’s a story you’ll want to read. The Big Roundtable is more than a digital publishing platform; it is a movement, one that we believe can expand the possibilities for writers, and readers.” Where’d this idea come from?

Shapiro: It came from, how best to put it, 35 years of writing for a living—in newspapers, magazines, and books, and seeing how the publishing world felt as it were shrinking, while all around it, the world was expanding. Believe me, I felt the pinch. There was ever more pressure, especially when it came to books, to come up with ideas that were sure to sell. Well, how is anyone supposed to know what will sell, other than genre fiction? At the same time, magazines were feeling ever more predictable, and had been for years. For several years I was a judge at the National Magazine Awards, and found ever more that while the stories I was reading while not bad, seldom lifted off the page. The writing had become so formulaic, so safe—anecdotal lede, nut graf, quote from eminent sociologist. It was ever harder to find a story that you sensed a writer needed to tell. And we all know the difference. We know what it is like writing a story that burns inside of us, and a story that is, well, interesting. The result was a landscape of predictability. Why were journalists, smart and eager journalists, constrained, when writers of creative fiction were freer to experiment and push? What happened to the New Journalism revolution? I cannot believe it peaked a generation ago. Where was the surprise?

You had a $5,000 Kickstarter goal and took in nearly $19,219, from 220 backers. Who gave, and why?

People we know—God bless them. And a lot of people we’d never heard of who contributed generously and who sometimes wrote to say, Hey, cool idea. I have a story. Can I send it along? The answer was, and is, always yes. (Pitches should go to TheBRTable@gmail.com.)

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by Paige Williams | May 10, 2013 | posted in narrative news | comments (0)
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Why Charles Ramsey’s interview is great (and it’s okay* to think so)

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Everybody loved the Charles Ramsey interviews on freeing Amanda Berry, one of three young women abducted in Cleveland a decade ago and apparently held captive all this time. Then of course, people hated it. Or some did, anyway, raising questions about the meme of the “hilarious black neighbor.” Until details about the story had time to emerge—what went on in that house, and how such secrets went undetected for so long—all the attention was on Ramsey, and his unfiltered recounting of the excitement on Seymour Street. You’ve seen the video and heard the audio, but here it is in text form:

“Yeah, hey bro,” Ramsey told the dispatcher. “I’m at 2207 Seymour. West 25th. Check this out—I just came from McDonald’s, right? So I’m on my porch eating my little food, right? This broad is trying to break out the fucking house next door to me, so there’s a bunch of people on the street right now and shit. So we’re like, ‘What’s wrong? What’s the problem?’ She’s like, ‘This motherfucker done kidnapped me and my daughter…’ She say her name is Linda Berry or some shit. I don’t know who the fuck that is, I just moved over here, bro.”

“Sir, sir,” said the male dispatcher. “…You have to calm down and slow down. Is she still in the street?”

“Seymour Avenue,” Ramsey said.

“Is she still in the street or where did she go?”

“Yeah I’m looking at her right now. She’s calling y’all! She’s on the other phone.”

They went on for a bit, with Ramsey getting frustrated and the dramatic tension (hello, narrative) rising. A short while later the TV news crews arrived, and Ramsey’s story got longer and more detailed, with discrepancies:

I went to McDonald’s and I’m at home and I hear this, ‘Help, let me out!’ This girl screaming. Now we don’t have that on our street because everybody on this street knows each other, so when you hear something like that you come running to see what’s going on. I thought it was a kid got attacked by a pit bull. And I looked at that girl and I said, ‘You look familiar!’ And I’m prying the door open and she’s trying to get out, and she climbed through the bottom of it and soon as she got out she said, ‘My name is Amanda Berry, call the police.’

You heard screaming? the reporter asked.

I heard screaming. I’m eating my McDonald’s. I come outside and I see this girl going nuts, trying to get out of her house, so I go on the porch and she says, ‘Help me get out, I’ve been in here a long time,’ so I figured it was a domestic violence dispute so I opened the door and we can’t get in that way because…a body can’t fit through, only your hand. So we kicked the bottom and she comes out with a little girl and she says, ‘Call 911. My name is Amanda Berry.’ When she told me, it didn’t register until I got to calling 911… I thought this girl was dead, you know what I mean? And she got on the phone and she said, ‘Yes, this is me…’

And when did you see Gina?

About five minutes after the police got here. See, that girl Amanda told the police, ‘I ain’t just the only one, it’s some more girls up in that house.’ So they went up there 30, 40 deep, and when they came out it was just astonishing because I thought they were gonna come up with nothing.

How long you lived here?

I been here a year! I barbecue with this dude. We eat ribs and whatnot, and listen to salsa music.

And you had no indication?

Not a clue that that girl was in that house, or that anybody else was in there against their will. Because how he is, he just comes out to his back yard, plays with the dogs, tinkering with his cars and motorcycles, goes back in the house. He’s somebody that you look at and look away because he’s not doing nothing but the average stuff. There’s nothing exciting about him. Well, until today.

What was the reaction on the girls’ faces? I can’t imagine…

Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Dead giveaway. Either she’s homeless or she got problems. That’s the only reason she’s running to a black man.

[The interview over, Ramsey flashed the thumbs-up.]

Why this is great and people love it: First, true originals mesmerize. Unfiltered, unmanaged, Ramsey was authentically who he is. Second, he told a story. His account of the escape is straight up narrative. The elements are there: a compelling character with an original voice (“Yeah, hey, bro…check this out;” “so they went up there 30, 40 deep;” “We eat ribs and whatnot”); there’s a clear structure (chronological), dialogue (which is key), and the aforementioned dramatic tension; it’s got what Tom Wolfe calls status details—food from McDonald’s, assumptions about a pit bull attack and a domestic violence dispute. And then the underdog hero utters a Hemingway’s-iceberg line of dialogue:

“Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms.”

So the story becomes transcendent.

If you’re writing the long-ball narrative you wouldn’t want to omit what happened next, which was that Ramsey, inevitably, went viral. Why? Did the public love him for his storytelling skills? His authenticity? His gutsy instincts? Yep. And was that okay? Absolutely. There was nothing, on Day 1, not to love. This was “a wonderfully vibrant interview with a man who helped kick down a door and rescue three women and a child,” said Neely Tucker, a veteran Washington Post reporter and author of Love in the Driest Season, when we informally polled a few journalists on the topic. “It was precise, exciting, emotional, visually telling, and told with great pacing and narrative …

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by Paige Williams | May 9, 2013 | posted in narrative news | comments (2)
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“Why’s this so good?” No. 77: Danny and the carjackers

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One of the most riveting stories to emerge from the Boston Marathon bombing coverage was the Boston Globe piece, by Eric Moskowitz, about “Danny,” the young Chinese entrepreneur who spent more than an hour with the bombers in his carjacked Mercedes, trying to figure out how to escape. The story was relatively short, at 2,183 words, and read even faster because Moskowitz kept a tight focus on narrative action. A passage:

Moskowitz, via @GlobeMoskowitz

@GlobeMoskowitz

With Tamerlan driving now, Danny in the passenger seat, and Dzhokhar behind Danny, they stopped in Watertown Center so Dzhokhar could withdraw money from the Bank of America ATM using Danny’s card. Danny, shivering from fear but claiming to be cold, asked for his jacket. Guarded by just one brother, Danny wondered if this was his chance, but he saw around him only locked storefronts. A police car drove by, lights off.

Tamerlan agreed to retrieve Danny’s jacket from the back seat. Danny unbuckled, put on the jacket, then tried to buckle the seat belt behind him to make an escape easier. “Don’t do that,” Tamerlan said, studying him. “Don’t be stupid.”

Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark broke down the story’s strengths beautifully in a recent post. Three highlights:

It begins, like the ancient epics, in medias res—in the middle of things.

“The 26-year-old Chinese entrepreneur had just pulled his new Mercedes to the curb on Brighton Avenue to answer a text when an old sedan swerved behind him, slamming on the brakes. A man in dark clothes got out and approached the passenger window. It was nearly 11 p.m. last Thursday.” (I can’t help feel a digital-age irony here, that Danny drives into mortal danger by doing the right thing — pulling over to text.)

Clark, speaking at a Nieman Narrative Journalism conference

Clark, speaking at a Nieman Narrative Journalism conference

The construction of narrative journalism depends upon certain strategies associated traditionally with fiction, and we get all of them here: scene, dialogue, character details, point of view. The fact that the events tick-tock in a block of time (about 90 minutes) and inside the confines of an automobile, create what classical critics might call a unity of time, place and action that intensifies the experience of the reader.

This story should remind us of how rarely dialogue appears in breaking news, with reporters depending more often on quotes gathered after the fact. Even though he is using a single source (the bombers being unavailable, one dead, one arrested), the writer chooses to re-create the dialogue in the car based on Danny’s recollection. I count at least 12 paragraphs containing dialogue such as: “Don’t look at me!” Tamerlan shouted at one point. “Do you remember my face?” / “No, no, I don’t remember anything,” [Danny] said.

For more installments of “Why’s this so good?” go here.

 

by Paige Williams | May 7, 2013 | posted in why's this so good? | comments (0)
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Prize stories, Part 2: A National Magazine Award for Pamela Colloff

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Storytelling prize season wound down last night with the presentation of the National Magazine Awards, the Pulitzers of the American magazine world. Texas Monthly’s Pamela Colloff took the “Ellie” for her two-part narrative series on a man wrongly imprisoned for 25 years in the violent death of his wife. “The Innocent Man” topped stories from Byliner, GQ, Mother Jones, The New Yorker and Wired, in a category tweaked, this year, to combine feature and profile writing. (Texas Monthly also won for Public Interest, with a Mimi Swartz story on women’s health. You can find the full list of winners and finalists here.)

Swartz, Colloff and fact checker David Moorman from last night's festivities, courtesy the @TexasMonthly Twitter feed.

Left to right: Swartz, Colloff and fact checker David Moorman at last night’s festivities, courtesy the @TexasMonthly Twitter feed.

Colloff recently annotated “The Innocent Man” for Storyboard, as part of our growing Annotation Tuesday! series. Here’s a snippet from Part 1, with Storyboard’s comments in green and Colloff’s in blue:

A running gag between them involved Michael calling out, “Bitch, get me a beer!”<Interesting details, because this moment (and their history of squabbling) was turned against Morton in court. What was your perception of Michael Morton before you began your reporting, and how and why did your opinion change, if it changed at all?/pw I’m using a detail that later is cast in a very dark light by the prosecution, but I’m presenting it here as Michael and Christine saw it, which was as just a joke. A lot of the media coverage following Michael’s 2011 exoneration made him appear almost saintly, because he did not want revenge and he handled his wrongful incarceration with such grace. But that’s not who he was back in 1986. I wanted people to see his rough edges and his imperfections so that he would be a real person. Also, I wanted to provide some context for the way that investigators in the case saw him. His crudeness was, I think, part of what led investigators to think he was capable of violence. As for where this detail came from, the marigolds came from the trial transcript, and I asked Michael about it in more detail, which is when he explained their placement in the yard./pc —something they had once overheard a friend of a friend shout at his girlfriend. Christine would respond by telling Michael to go screw himself. “He teased her a lot, and he would go right up to the line of what was acceptable, and sometimes he went over it,” Gersky said. Referring to an attractive friend of theirs who stopped by the house one day wearing shorts, he told Christine, “Now, that’s the way you should look.”<Great detail; source?/pw A friend of Christine’s told me this and our tireless fact-checker, David Moorman, ran it past Michael before publication./pc

And from Part 2:

“When I got here, they used to put all new arrivals in the field force,” Michael<One thing I meant to ask in Part 1: How did you decide to refer to him as “Michael” and not Morton?/pw Excellent question. I always wrestle with whether or not to refer to a protagonist by his/her first or last name. In this case, there were practical reasons to go with his first name. Christine had the same last name, so it ended up being an easy decision. (Calling him “Morton” and her “Christine” seemed awfully weird.) But generally speaking I like the immediacy of using someone’s first name, when it’s appropriate./pc wrote, referring to inmates who were assigned to work on the prison farm. That had been three years earlier. Now 47, he was too old to be doing hard physical labor all day long, he told Garcia. His face had settled into the softer contours of middle age, and his sandy blond hair was going gray. “Try to imagine twenty to forty men,” he continued, “shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, swinging their [hoes] in unison and chopping weeds that are, I swear to God, six to ten feet high. Or, on the bad days, working in a huge irrigation ditch, skinning the banks down to bare earth<Hey, not bad, the writing./pw I know! I get a lot of letters from prison, and I can assure you that none of them sound like this./pc and then dragging the chopped-up vegetation back up the banks. It’s long, hard, backbreaking work.

A few other Colloff favorites from the Storyboard files:

-Her piece “‘Why’s this so good?’ No. 65: David Grann and the death row prisoner.” In our ongoing series, Colloff wrote about Grann’s treatment of the questionable case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas for killing his children.

-Her chat with Storyboard about her story on a mother convicted of killing her son with salt.

-Her piece about the innocence of death row inmate Anthony Graves, which we included in a “What we’re reading” post.

Congratulations, Pam, and thank you for your work!

by Paige Williams | May 3, 2013 | posted in narrative news | comments (0)
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