August 8, 2008
Summer Salmagundi
Like many of you who completed our recent survey, our curiosity about narrative extends far beyond daily news journalism. So it seemed especially appropriate in August to offer some summer fare — different genres, different publications, a little heft, a little levity. We requested, and received, story suggestions from all corners, and decided to offer up a grab bag of unusual narratives.
Many Digest readers passed along “The Real Work” from a March issue of the New Yorker, which we discuss in the Commentary. Another reader suggested Gene Weingarten’s “Pearls Before Breakfast,” about a world-class violinist playing anonymously at rush hour in a Washington, D.C., metro station. But since Weingarten’s piece had garnered attention when it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, we decided to feature a less well-known Weingarten article that, like Gopnik’s piece, touches on illusions and magic.
Games, magic, illusions, deception — oh, and a little morning music — all seemed perfectly suited to a summer reading list. Going through other recommended pieces, we found sex, sports, and a few takes on mortality.
Mike Donila of The St. Petersburg Times found sex-lite at an upscale Clearwater bar that hawks “naked sushi” — raw rolls laid out on the almost-naked body of a model, then served to patrons. Sex also takes center stage in “Why Dirty Is Funny,” a commentary by Jim Holt that ran in The Los Angeles Times. Holt uses the “porn stash” of a federal appeals court judge as the departure point for an essay on sexual jokes — somehow managing to consult the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schoepenhauer, and George H.W. Bush in the process.
Holt’s witty writing is a good match for his subject, and this confluence between an author’s voice and his subject also drew our attention to The New York Times obituary of William F. Buckley, Jr., subtitled “Sesquipedalian Spark of Right.” We were surprised that a reader would recommend an obituary for light summer reading, until we read the piece, which doesn’t ignore some of the uglier chapters of the arch conservative’s life (such as his early support of segregation), but feels more like a riotous romp through the life of a raging intellectual.
Another essay took quite a different tack on the subject of death: the lyrical “Millthorpe Cemetery Blues”, originally in the Sydney Morning Herald, unwinds some Australian country graveyard atmospherics.
Finally, those hungry for more gravity along with the levity might want to view a documentary that airs August 19 on PBS and will be screened in California, Chile, and Belgium. The Judge and the General is the story of a Chilean judge who discovers long-buried secrets while investigating former dictator Augusto Pinochet. One of the film’s two producer/directors, Elizabeth Farnsworth, talked about the challenges of making a historical documentary at the 2008 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism.
Listen to a portion of her talk:
(Farnsworth’s entire talk is available from Cambridge Transcriptions).
We’ll be back after Labor Day with some new features, and perhaps even a new look. In the meantime, keep sending your favorite stories.
— Constance Hale and Andrea Pitzer
July 11, 2008
Common stories, told uncommonly
When we considered this month’s featured narrative, the cliché “there’s no such thing as a new story” came to mind. We often favor narratives that surprise by taking us to new corners of the world. But the truth is, there are certain topics that journalists, to best serve their readers, must return to again and again.
One such topic is aging and the concomitant burdens of caregiving. The problem never goes away, and as Time claims more victims, there is always a new audience eager for insight. Three years ago we featured “What Are We Going to Do With Dad?” by geriatrician Jerald Winakur. Other related stories we’ve spotlighted range from “Letting Go: Dylan's last days,” on parents who remove their disabled son from life support, to “Offering an Education in Aging,” on the world of elderly nuns and their participation in a medical study. (The editors of this site are intimately familiar with the narrative challenges of this evergreen subject: Constance Hale’s “My Father, Lost and Found” ran in the October 2000 issue of Health magazine.)
In this month’s selection, “Caring for Tommy,” which ran in The Roanoke Times, we were impressed with the ways Beth Macy used narrative elements to make such a common story uncommon. Her handling of Tommy and Linda Rhodes relies on wonderful dialogue and scenes; her attentive reporting doesn’t ignore prickly family dynamics; her structure poignantly reflects the arc of decline.
We also welcomed the paper’s multimedia approach, in which the narrative potential of photography and videography were also brought to bear on such a story, with Josh Meltzer’s camera work informing the print version and Macy’s reporting spurring Meltzer on to new footage.
If one way to learn the varietal characteristics of a wine grape is to taste fine samples from various winemakers, one way to learn narrative technique may be to read fine stories from various literary writers. Recommended reading this month includes John Bailey’s Elegy for Iris, a book-length account of his wife’s descent into dementia. Jonathan Franzen's “My Father's Brain” presents the subject from the child’s point of view.
We will explore various aspects of narrative here at the Walter Lippmann House in late September, when we host the three-day Nieman Seminar for Narrative Editors. Our speakers will include Adam Moss (editor in chief of New York), David Talbot (founder of Salon as well as a new company producing narratives in various media), Stuart Warner (special projects editor at The Plain Dealer), and Clark Boyd (public-radio correspondent and podcaster for The World).
Between now and then, we hope to feature some “summer reading” — personal essays, humor, and cultural reporting. Readers who completed our recent survey requested some different genres, and we will happily deliver. If you have a favorite example, please send it to us.
— Constance Hale
June 6, 2008
Going beyond the “human interest” cliché
We at the Digest frequently receive a certain kind of submission that summons the echoes of all the city editors we’ve known. “Great human interest!” these pieces scream. “Let’s run it on A-1! Give it 60 inches.” Such stories often depict an accident victim’s painstaking recovery, a child’s heartbreaking illness and treatment, or a war veteran’s struggle for redemption. They are the equivalent of the movie-theater “tear jerker”: tragedies that hit us in the gut, whether or not they are told artfully.
Once we get over this initial reaction, we find ourselves questioning whether these “human interest” stories really are great narratives. Are the characters drawn with surprising nuance and paradox, or are they one-dimensional? Has the narrative arc been thoughtfully drawn, or is the piece a mere chronological account? Do the sentences unfold with the rhythms of complex thought, or do they move in predictable declarative bursts? Is the word-count appropriate for the story at hand, or is it just long? Does the writer find the right stance toward the material, balancing reporting, insight, and pitch-perfect tone, or do the words come off as sentimental, mawkish, treacly?
Most importantly, does the piece find the universal in the particular? Does the writer peer through a keyhole at one experience, and render it, however faithfully, through a narrow scope, or does he or she see the deeper themes implicit in the story, and then find the voice to make them explicit?
Joanna Connors' "Beyond Rape" is the kind of story we often find ourselves hoping for. It is a classic first-person narration, in which the writer provides a unifying presence in a 20,000-word odyssey. But it is much more than a tale of personal catharsis; it is also an ambitious piece of enterprise reporting.
“I wanted to take back control of my story from the rapist,” Connors told us in an interview. Realizing she could do this by using the reporting tools she had developed on countless other stories, Connors met with the rapist’s family. She uncovered three generations of convicted sexual offenders and stories of children hung on hooks and beaten. Ultimately, Connors’s story uses her experience to thoughtfully address a panoply of social issues, from sex, race, and abuse to class, poverty, and the criminal justice system.
“The journey took me across the boundary of the two Americas, which I had only crossed as a reporter, on news stories,” she told us. “The piece turned into a story of what parents pass on to our children, and about the immense privilege of birth that we on this side of the boundary take for granted.”
Connors’ editors took a big risk, electing to devote an entire supplement to this piece, which Connors had originally envisioned as a book-length work. In the newspaper, the story was accompanied by large and evocative black and white photos. Ironically, our digital format allows us to show you only the online version. Connors’ story makes the best argument we can imagine for retaining the broadsheet as a platform for inspiring narrative journalism.
How to edit and package such ambitious stories is one of the many topics we will be tackling at the Nieman Foundation in September. Our three-day conference for editors, “Shaping Stories for the Book, the Blog, the Broadsheet, and the Blackberry,” will bring 10 top editors — including Stuart Warner, one of Connors’ mentors at The Plain Dealer — to lead talks, panels and workshops for 60 mid-career editors from around the country.
Please consider joining us. If you can’t, keep sending your stories and your comments.
— Constance Hale
May 6, 2008
Narratives Not-From-Here
After several reporters sent us intriguing stories from abroad, we realized that trying to pick one stellar piece of narrative foreign reporting was as impossible as picking one piece of fruit from a Paris street market. We weren't just trying to compare apples and oranges — we were trying to compare bananas, mangoes, and pomegranates, too.
So, extending the metaphor, we decided to offer up a basket of fruits this month, rather than one shiny specimen.
The stories we selected fulfill the seemingly contradictory goals of foreign correspondence: first, describing a faraway place with enough vivid detail so as to deliver the exotic — showing readers how it feels to be in a distant and quite particular place; second, describing a faraway place with enough depth and insight to bring it close to the reader — to reveal the universality of the human experience.
“Viewing Life from the Roof” was sent to us recently by Jeffrey Fleishman. Based in Cairo and filing frequently for the Los Angeles Times, Fleishman allows his stories to unfold more as vignettes than as grand narratives — he chooses a tight focus and fills his frame with exquisitely captured characters and scenes. “Cairo is a city of rooftops,” he tells us in this month’s selection, which ran at 1,900 words. Half of Egypt’s population of 73 million is terribly poor, Fleishman adds, and in the ancient capital the poor often raise families “on rooftops and in parks, graveyards, median strips and shanties hammered along the Nile.” In his eloquent writing style, Fleishman allows us into the lives of these millions through the person of Alia Qotb — 69, haunted by memories and regrets, and always alert to the “world [that] is going on below her.”
David Samuels works within a larger frame. When he stumbled across a Reuters article about a series of incidents where young people had gassed themselves to death in cars outside Tokyo, he says, he began to see that “the subject of anonymous group suicide might be an interesting way to think about suicide bombing in the Arab countries and the wider Muslim world.” “Let’s Die Together,” which ran in The Atlantic, doesn’t lack stark intimacy (“the black shadow in my heart remains,” one person admits online; “when we get older, nobody stops us”), but it links the Japanese phenomenon with guerilla movements such as the Palestinian national movement and the Tamil Tigers. Samuels wrote in an email to us that after 9/11, he began to find himself “pulled towards finding a language and stories that would help explain America to the world and the world to America.” His inventive narrative succeeds in bringing “suicide-positive cultures” to us.
Samuels had three months in Japan to research his story — and just under 5,000 words in which to tell it. Many of us, of course, never get the luxury of such time and space. So we also wanted to call attention to a foreign story reported and written within the span of eight hours. The Guardian’s Xan Rice is based in Nairobi, and when the aftermath of elections Kenya turned violent, he was dispatched to cover the ethnic strife. Rice filed a news account about the torching of a church western Kenya, in which dozens of people from President Mwai Kibaki’s ethnic group perished. But Rice also filed a sidebar, in which he visits the Assemblies of God Pentecostal Church, with smoke still rising from embers, among which are strewn a child’s shoe, a woman’s sandal, a bible, and corncobs that were to be cooked for lunch. He talks to Kikuyu victims (“They were from around here and even knew some of our names. We kneeled down and surrendered. It was quiet, as we were all praying. We knew this was the end.”). He tracks down Kalenjin villagers who were part of the rampage (“They were not worshipping in the church. They were hiding. That makes it a cave not a church.”) He even cites a text message from a horrified Kalenjin bystander fearing reprisals (“No transport. Road blocked with stons. Elctrisity disconnected. No car fuel. House still baning and robary. We r so scared.”)
Powerful stuff.
— Constance Hale and Andrew Meldrum
April 4, 2008
Glengarry Glen Ross in Glendale?
Call us fans of long-form narrative. We are. But let us confess something less obvious: we are thrilled with stories that run deep without running on.
“Climbing a Ladder Made of Lipstick,” by Molly Hennessy-Fiske, is one such story. In a compact 2,000 words, this Los Angeles Times writer gives us a window on the U.S. economy, immigration, hard-luck Latinos, and the stubborn persistence of the American Dream.
How does she do it? Hennessy-Fiske starts with a good idea, which she boils down right at the top: “In a land of opportunity, cosmetic direct sales looks like a shortcut to the middle class, a corporate ladder whose first rung doesn’t require a high school diploma or even English skills. As Latina saleswomen rise through the ranks, they are changing the face of Mary Kay, long associated with blond Texas founder Mary Kay Ash.”
But Hennessy-Fiske’s real knack is her use of character. Too often, characters merely adorn news narratives. They provide the occasional face in a sea of talking heads — or perhaps an opening hook and a closing quote. But Hennessy-Fiske clearly searched for an altogether different kind of character, one who could enliven the entire story. After an editor at the Los Angeles Times steered her toward women who hadn’t yet made it, Hennessy-Fiske spent many hours with several potential subjects before settling on the perfect one.
But, of course, it takes more than such dedicated reporting to craft a compelling narrative. In a deft sketch combining the physical and the psychological, Hennessy-Fiske lodges Altagracia Valdez in our imagination:
Valdez’s skin is caramel-colored, lined with age and hard times that Mary Kay creams and lotions can't smooth away. But she has learned to use her grandmotherly looks to entice customers. Immigrant women welcome her into their homes like a relative, often during the day, to buy cosmetics while their husbands are away. They call her Alta, “tall” in Spanish, an ironic nickname for a diminutive woman who stands 5 feet 2, always looking up to somebody, always listening.
Valdez works so well as a character because she manifests larger themes: She is an immigrant. She has been hemmed in by a husband who beat her and by seven children who call on her for babysitting. She has a “burning desire to improve” her looks and her finances. She needs health insurance and a new car. But more than anything else, she is determined to grab hold of the lowest rung and never stop climbing.
Importantly, Hennessy-Fiske gets at this last aspect of her character through action. (To use the editing cliché, she shows us, rather than tells us.) Check out the description of Valdez navigating her way through apartment courtyards smelling of Mexico (“cheap laundry detergent mingling with the sweet scent of simmering corn tortillas”) and past “garden Nativity scenes and apartments with pictures of the Virgin of Guadalupe taped to the windows.” She ascends a rickety stone staircase in her JCPenney pumps, then slips, falls, picks herself up, smiles, and knocks on the door of a pregnant woman who had promised to recruit customers.
Would it be grandiose to say that the estrellas of Mary Kay shine as brightly as American literary archetypes Willy Loman and Shelley Levene? Perhaps. But when characters are both this desperate and this dogged, the spirits of Arthur Miller and David Mamet hover.
— Constance Hale
March 7, 2008
Finding new ways to frame election-year narratives
In a season awash with political narratives — devised by campaign strategists, drafted by speechwriters, delivered in the undeviating tones of careful candidates — we couldn’t help but ask ourselves which reporters have managed to wrest narratives away from presidential wannabes. We wanted to revisit pieces that made us laugh, shudder, or just say “aha.” Are there writers, we wondered, who cover the campaign in the mold of an R. W. Apple or a Gail Sheehy; is there a magazine in 2008 that recalls Esquire in 1968?
We also wondered whether we’d find gems in the usual places — magazine and newspaper features — or diamonds-in-the-rough in the myriad blogs that are breaking stories and shaping opinions.
We emailed political writers and editors across the country, asking where they were seeing the best storytelling. “In the political arena, this is not a great time for narrative,” one wrote back. Long-form narrative journalism, we heard, is losing out to analysis or scoops. “The proliferation of blogs,” wrote another, “means that there is not as much informative narrative writing as there once was.” Those who copped to following blogs insisted that it was for “data” — links or headlines — but “certainly not for good narrative.”
Perhaps predictably, profiles rose to the top: Todd Purdum’s piece on Barack Obama in Vanity Fair; a light-hearted study of that unlikely Romeo, Dennis Kucinich, by The Washington Post’s Libby Copeland; a piercing portrait of Mike Huckabee by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. Yes, serious political profiles still provide a home for relentless reporting, keen observation, colorful characters, and the insights of strong narrators.
And what about blogs? Despite the high profiles of the Huffington Post, the Daily Kos, or that ur-site, the Drudge Report, we were not able to find a single one we’d call narrative. Most are written in bits and pieces, with voice being the most constant narrative element.
Hendrik Hertzberg’s blog on newyorker.com did impress, though. In “Rally,” we found some of what we were looking for:
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The description of the Izod Arena (“Mammoth, isolated structures, some of them skeletally half-completed, are placed seemingly at random on a prairie of empty parking lots … like a mining colony on one of the larger moons of Saturn.”); |
| • |
Crisp character sketches (“Kennedy’s thick body was dressed in downtown black. He really is an astounding old lion. He has the great white mane, the heavy features, and the slow-moving confidence of a king of the beasts. And his roar!”); |
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Fresh language and playful voice (the “Obameter”); |
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A narrator who pulled no punches (“Whoever was responsible for organizing this event should be put in a job where he or she can do no further harm.”) |
Will Hertzberg’s blogs be the accounts we fondly remember in years to come, or will it be up to journalists like Joe Klein and David Maraniss to make sense of the campaign in book-length narratives? We’re not sure which magazine is today’s Esquire, but we have to admit that Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone sure did remind us of Hunter S. Thompson.
Send us your thoughts.
— Constance Hale
February 4, 2008
Do the demands of narrative depend on the medium?
Scrutinizing “The Fight for Sugar Hill,” this month’s notable narrative, we couldn’t help but wonder how exactly to evaluate online narratives paired with pictures, podcasts or other interactive elements. Such elements would once have been considered complementary, but not central, to the narrative. Yet one of the things that recommended this Dallas Morning News story was its slide show, a stunning series of black-and-white images that unfolds over a gospel solo, punctuated by audio from the story’s subjects.
We found ourselves struggling to determine how to evaluate multimedia storytelling in the context of the Narrative Digest. Should text always be held to the same standard, whether or not it stands alone? Or should it be considered within the tapestry of sound and pictures in which it appears — and was conceived? Should we open the editorial floodgates to narratives driven as much by audio and images as by dramatic writing?
Drilling deeper, what exactly elevates a story — no matter how it is told — into narrative nonfiction? The mere presence of a compelling central character is not enough; we want to see that character transform in the course of the story. Photographs may obviate the need for long character descriptions, but we still need reporters to get under a character’s skin — and to take us there. The objective, third-person point-of-view drilled into us by city editors is not adequate: we long for a narrator whose presence is felt through style, tone, or distinctive voice. And simple chronology often fails to provide a real narrative arc — building tension, dramatic climax, and satisfying resolution.
We couldn’t help thinking that such a master of drama as David Mamet — who revels in men down on their luck and destined to fall short of their dreams — would have applauded Paul Meyer’s choice of Pastor Rock as a protagonist. So, too, might Jimmy Breslin, who was described recently by the New York Times as “having mined the lives of small-time crooks and losers, of racing touts and amiable rogues … whose lack of stature in the larger world could not disguise a certain depth of heart.” And yet Pastor Rock’s own human frailties seemed to prevent the transformation we often hunger for in classic narratives. At such times, the narrator may need to do extra work to give a reader the satisfaction of an epiphany, or a sense of transformation.
With the increasing use of multimedia storytelling, we suspect we will be bringing such a critical eye to bear again and again. Particularly as some newsrooms downsize their veteran reporters and editors while they upsize their multimedia staffs, we will be on the lookout for stories that show a print reporter has been given time, space, and great editing as well as multimedia sidebars. We will applaud publications like The Dallas Morning News, which apply their resources to packages like “The Fight for Sugar Hill.” But we will also continue to celebrate those which concentrate their energies on good-old stories told the traditional way.
Questions about the uses and abuses of multimedia will occupy center stage at the upcoming Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, where Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jacqui Banaszynski will ask whether “bells and whistles distract from or deepen storytelling,” and Nieman Fellow Stuart Watson will ask if video narratives do anything that isn’t done just as well by TV.
Please join us if you can. And do send us your thoughts about the questions we’ve raised, as well as examples of stories, old-fashioned or new, that make us think deeply about the nature of narrative nonfiction.
— Constance Hale
December 21, 2007
How to tell a story when the story is still war
With Iraq and Afghanistan dominating headlines year after year, we are especially interested to see how different writers and publications use narrative to avoid staleness in depicting the gains, losses, and violence inherent in war.
The idealized war correspondent — a courageous, roving journalist writing from the trenches — has been, like many things, upended by the conflict in Iraq. Journalists embedded with troops at the outset of the war seemed to lose the freedom and wider perspective of their predecessors, while keeping the danger. More recent circumstances make us wonder how correspondents can “report from the trenches” in a conflict without front lines.
What kinds of stories best inform a war-weary public: Long newspaper articles? Video narratives? Photo galleries? Blogs? Charticles? Footage of beheadings? If the first casualty of war is truth, is another casualty narrative itself? It is easier to pose such questions than to answer them, but we would like to enter the conversation about the storytelling methods that reporters are using to represent the war at home and abroad.
The narratives we feature on the Web site are selected from stories that have been submitted to us by readers, so we don’t claim to offer a representative sampling.
One article that caught our attention, though, was “Anguish in the Ruins of Mutanabi Street,” by Sudarsan Raghavan, published in The Washington Post. The Post also has a dynamic Web site, which includes the extraordinary work of videographer Travis Fox. For his series “A Nation Divided,” Fox traveled to New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina to document people’s feelings about the war at the beginning of the presidential primary season.
Closer to our home here in Cambridge, The Boston Globe has been covering another aspect of the war — veterans — in a variety of narratives. Globe reporter Charles Sennott started 2007 with coverage of veteran Jonathan Schulze’s suicide in Minnesota, and has returned to this topic throughout the year, most recently with “Back, but not at home: battered returning vets struggle with transition,” which ran in November, complemented by online video and survey statistics.
Blogs on the war run the gamut. George Packer writes “Interesting Times” for The New Yorker, analyzing domestic politics as well as challenges in Iraq.
Colleagues at Salon pointed us to “Baghdad Burning”. In her blog, a young Iraqi woman of hidden identity describes events in Iraq and the politics that influence them as her family prepares to leave for Syria. Without the affiliation of a news organization, such “citizen journalism” offers readers the subjective voice of experience but also limited accountability.
The dangers of limited accountability came to the forefront earlier this year with the publication of three pieces in The New Republic from Scott Thomas Beauchamp, who serves with the US Army in Iraq. Beauchamp’s diary excerpts detailed a tank targeting dogs and troops ridiculing an injured woman. His work ignited a controversy that resulted in the magazine’s statement earlier this month that it would no longer stand behind Beauchamp’s pieces.
The Beauchamp affair is a cautionary tale as journalism searches for ways to use new media and narratives without losing the advantages of traditional formats. We look forward to seeing — and featuring — narratives you have written, or impressive stories you find and send to us...
Here’s to peace in 2008.
— Constance Hale and Andrea Pitzer
November 30, 2007
Marching Toward March
In my first note in this space, I mentioned the early signs of fall that greeted my arrival in Cambridge. Now, exactly two months later, the maple leaves are gone, their abandoned branches silhouetted against milky gray skies. Winter presses in.
But the plunging temperatures have hardly sent us into hibernation.
The Digest team has been combing through submissions, selecting a Tamara Jones story from the Washington Post as our monthly example of a notable narrative. Jones’s lyrical sentences, suggestive images, and evocative characters make “The Answers in the Wind” an inspired day-after-disaster story.
Also inspiring are the multimedia narratives readers have begun to send. While we wait for structural changes that will enable us to feature new narrative forms on our site, we wanted to call attention to “Tackling Life,” a package that appeared recently in the Sacramento Bee. In it, a reporter and photographer track down members of a 1992 Pee Wee football team whose experiences belie the term childhood. This nonlinear story animates dire statistics on young African American males and shows how newspapers are beginning to combine images, sound, video, and words in the service of narrative journalism.
Multimedia will be a large part of the next Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, which will be held from March 14 to March 16 at the Boston Sheraton. Please visit our Web site for updates. The theme is “storytelling in many media, many voices,” and the journalists giving keynote addresses include Emmy- and Peabody-award winner John Hockenberry, Washington Post reporters Anne Hull and Dana Priest, MIT professor Sherry Turkle, and documentary filmmaker Sam Pollard.
But for now, we join the coated masses trudging through the Massachusetts chill, cheered by the thoughts of future submissions, which we look forward to sharing with you.
— Constance Hale
October 8, 2007
Notions of narrative
What is it about the word narrative that makes reporters think crisis, or heartbreaking illness, or unspeakable danger? Are such gripping human-interest stories the only ones that earn news reporters the time for in-depth reporting and the space to craft stories with fleshed-out characters, full-fledged scenes, and artful arcs?
The notion that narratives must somehow involve human tragedy is one of many misconceptions about this form. Because so many of the submissions we receive at the Nieman Narrative Digest reflect this misconception, we decided to showcase a story in another mold.
“Grandmasters in Guayaberas” makes the point that compelling dramatic conflict can be found in all quarters. Touché to Josh Schonwald for finding four unlikely chess champs from Miami Dade College and following their quest to conquer opponents at the likes of Harvard, Yale, Texas, and Baltimore. And touché to Schonwald’s editors at Miami New Times.
We don’t mean to discourage writers from sending us human-interest stories. But we would love to see more short narratives, amusing musings, and provocative profiles.
Keep following these pages as we try to mix things up a bit.
Oh, and in using we I am not reverting to the quaint “editorial we” of the old New Yorker. Please check out Digest Staff to meet the capable journalists who are assisting me in picking stories each month.
— Constance Hale
September 7, 2007
A note from the new editor
 Hello from Cambridge in the waning days of summer, when the sun catches flecks of gold in the maple leaves, when students slowly drift onto campus, when geese punctuate hot nights with their plaintive calls.
The setting keeps startling me, as I have just arrived from my longtime home near San Francisco. Except for my college years in New Jersey, I have spent most of my life in Hawaii (where I was born and reared) and on the West Coast (where I have worked as a journalist for 25 years).
I have come to Cambridge to oversee the narrative program at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, as well as this Web site.
Building on the fine work of my predecessors, Mark Kramer and Nell Lake, I’ll continue to make this site a home for the best narrative work being done by journalists in various contexts and in many media. The focus will remain on great storytelling, but you may begin to see — in addition to pieces from newspapers and magazines — more tales published online and onscreen, more stories told through podcasts and broadcasts.
These new narrative twists will reflect my longtime interest in the craft of writing, which began when, as a school girl, I listened to the Pidgin English of my Hawaiian playmates. It deepened while I studied English Literature at Princeton University. And it took a subversive turn while I was an editor at Wired magazine, working with other editors to find “the New New Journalism.” Some of my ideas about narrative tradition and linguistic innovation are expressed in my two books, Wired Style and Sin and Syntax. You’ll see these ideas and others reflected both on this site and in the upcoming Nieman Narrative Conference.
Please continue to visit the Narrative Digest for inspiration, and please keep sending your favorite stories. I’m eager to get to know you through your work — and through your comments. This site isn’t intended just as a resource or a one-way publication, but as a place for journalists to come together to query, critique, and congratulate.
— Constance Hale
| Comments from Founding Editor Nell Lake |
May 25, 2007
This issue
One of the pleasures of my job has been reading newspaper stories written (shockingly!) with irony. By this I mean not ordinary irony — "Isn't it ironic?" — but writerly irony, what I think of as a wink from writer to reader. It's the experience of subtext, that there's more to the story than the events themselves — and more than the usual, civic-value stance that newspaper stories are generally written from. You'll find such subtext in two of the stories in this issue: David Finkel's "A Grisly Problem, Grateful Iraqis and a Grim Outlook" for The Washington Post and Manny Fernandez's "When Pennies Fail to Pay the Bill, a Bronx Man Pushes for Change" for The New York Times.
Besides the pieces on the home page, two other fine stories are new to the site: In "On to Her Next Race" Jo Ciavaglia writes for the (Bucks County, Pa.) Courier Times in a fresh way about a woman living with cancer. "A Desperate Mother Ignores the Odds" by Mai Tran and Christopher Goffard for the Los Angeles Times, use pure narration — no quotes or dialogue — in telling the story of a Vietnamese woman who travels across the globe and searches for her son.
A farewell (without irony)…
Four years ago, Mark Kramer, founding director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism, and I began conceiving of an online digest of notable narratives. Then came a (long!) period of design and building. For the past year or so I've been enjoying the fruits — reading, commenting on and learning from the work of narrative writers around the world, posting insightful and incisive essays from narrative luminaries. A wonderful gig.
But the time has come, as they say, to move on. I'm looking forward to having more time to write, to other editing and teaching work.
The Digest and its updates will continue, after a pause. In the next months the Nieman Foundation will hire a new director of the program on narrative journalism. This person will also be editing the site. Do keep submitting your stories. You can use the Contact Us button at the top of this and every page. You'll also be able to keep reading from the archive of notable narratives and essays on craft.
… and many thanks
Thanks, first, to you newspaper reporters who have sent me stories. You've made this site a success. Your work just may, as the L.A. Times' Tom Curwen notes in this issue, be the salvation of newspapers. Thanks to contributors from all media; I've been inspired by your stories — those voicey narratives about real, complex people, acting in vivid scenes, set with rich, felt-life detail.
Big thanks, too, to the editors and other experts who've contributed craft essays and sent stories: Barry Siegel, Doug McGill, Bruce DeSilva, Laurie Hertzel, Chip Scanlan, Rick Meyer, Roy Peter Clark, Stuart Warner, Rebecca Allen, Jacqui Banaszynski, Jim Collins, Jack Hart, Walt Harrington.
Finally, many thanks to Mark Kramer, without whose vision this site would not exist.
I'm wishing all of you — and everyone at the Nieman Foundation — the very best.
April 27, 2007
New pieces, on Iraq and in first person
In this issue you'll find pieces that use the first person in varied ways. In "Thembi's AIDS Diary" a young woman takes listeners on a tour of her life that is at once quirky, dignified and moving. The piece is a project of "Radio Diaries," which has produced a string of compelling pieces over the years by giving non-reporters tape decks and asking them to record their lives.
In "In an Instant, a Junkyard of Humanity" Sudarsan Raghavan writes for The Washington Post about surviving a bombing in Baghdad. With its spare and concrete language, the account takes a just-the-facts approach and is a model for showing, not telling. In "Band of Brothers" from The American Conservative magazine, Stewart Nusbaumer is more overtly concerned with theme and idea. Through a conversation with a traumatized soldier, he looks at issues of loyalty and sacrifice.
It happens that another piece featured in this issue looks at such Iraq-related themes from a much different angle. "Casualties of Conscience" by Mary Wiltenburg tells the stories of several soldiers who have deserted the military.
More new narratives
These two fine stories are also new to the archive: "The Good Fight" by Stephanie Earls for the Albany Times Union is an overcoming-odds narrative about a young woman struggling to put down her fists and build a new life. "Disposable Workers of the Oil and Gas Fields" by Ray Ring for the High Country News goes into our investigative-narrative file; it uses scene and character in unveiling the hellish and dangerous world of American oil and gas workers.
Enjoy the reading — and keep those submissions coming!
March 30, 2007
New narratives
These narratives are new to the archive, in addition to those on the home page:
"Head Trip" by Barry Bearak for The New York Times
"Sex-Crime Cop's Pursuit: Who was telling the truth?" by Maureen O'Hagan for the Seattle Times
"Learning Their Lessons" by Edgar Sandoval for the South Florida Sun Sentinel
"A Living Nightmare" by Erin Holmes for the Daily Herald of suburban Chicago
"Lost at Sea" by Kristin Harty for the Delaware News Journal
"The Light Within" by Kaitlin Manry for The Herald of Everett, Wa.
Telling True Stories
The anthology from the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, "Telling True Stories," edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, includes essays on craft by Susan Orlean, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Tracy Kidder, Malcolm Gladwell, Jon Franklin, Walt Harrington, Cynthia Gorney, Tom French, Jacqui Banaszynski, Tom Hallman, Isabel Wilkerson — and more. Find out more and how to order yours at http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/narrative/anthology/index.html.
March 16, 2007
New narratives
This issue adds several stories to both the endangered-children and science files: "In a Child's Best Interest" by Crocker Stephenson for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel struck me as unusual in its folksy and bold attitude toward a thorny ethical and political issue. In "Zach and the Reading Thrones" Cindy Lange-Kubick uses a storybook style to write about a little boy who has died and who loved to read. Her tone balances lightness and gravity. Amy Dockser Marcus's story about a physician and her ill son is a great model for mixing emotion and analysis.
Judy Pasternak's series about uranium contamination on the Navajo reservation documents the evidence that some Navajo's terrible health problems have been caused by that contamination. It's a painful but valuable read.
The following pieces are also new to the archive: In "The Big Game," Lem Satterfield and Kevin Van Valkenburg write for The Baltimore Sun about an inner-city football team and their struggles both on and off the field.
The Akron Beacon-Journal has begun a feature called "Sketches — A Peek at a Slice of Life," daily narrative-style pieces no longer than 18 inches. Kim Hone-McMahan is writing them; the example we chose is "Gospel Chorus Uplifts Akron Caregiver," which provides a fairly complete little story in little space. "Champions of Consumption" explores the world of competitive eating. In "On Kerouac's Trail," Kathleen Pierce travels with a college class learning about the life of Jack Kerouac.
"How They Did It" by Geoff Edgers for The Boston Globe is a fine example of creating narrative out of big public or private projects with many actors — in this case the construction of Boston's new Institute of Contemporary Art.
A new award
The first Mimi Award, created by The Dart Society to recognize exceptional work by an editor, was given earlier this month to David Clark Scott, international news editor at The Christian Science Monitor. For more information, go here: http://www.dartcenter.org/dartsociety/mimi_2007_main.html
Writing better serials
I also want to draw your attention to some terrific advice on craft by Roy Peter Clark (in case you weren't aware of it already): In "The Breakfast Serial," Roy provides instruction for writing the kind of serials he's known for: multi-part, gripping tales, each chapter of which a reader can finish over her morning coffee.
February 16, 2007
Science Narratives
In this issue on science narratives, I leaned toward pieces that really go after the "science" part of the term, the pieces that seek to inform. I read lots of stories that were more peripherally about science, too; it happens that these tended to fit a more standard definition of narrative, with characters encountering obstacles and resolving them. I migrated more toward the stories that taught me a lot while keeping me engaged with a sense of mystery or argument.
Loosening up the definition of narrative
In his essay for this issue, Michael Pollan suggests easing up the definition of narrative when it comes to science stories. Suspense and a sense of arc can grow, he says, out of a really good question or argument.
It happens that the titles to a bunch of the new stories in this issue are questions: "Is It Or Isn't It (Just Another Mouse)?" by Christie Aschwanden, "What Makes People Gay?" by Neil Swidey and "Why Is It So Damn Hard to Change?" by Rebecca Skloot. A fine idea-narrative from our archive is "The Seekers" by Amy Nutt
Jon Franklin, that master of narrative structure, writes science stories that stick to a stricter definition of narrative. "To Make a Mouse" and "The Fastest Man on Earth" are great examples.
Ideas and voice
If there's one element that's common to everything you might want to call narrative, it's voice. A distinct authorial presence. The companionship of the friendly storyteller. When that storyteller is also authoritative and well-informed, readers stay happily engaged. Michael Pollan captivates his readers in large part because his voice, with its humor and intelligence, is such a pleasure to read.
But it's not just the turns of language he employs that make his voice intriguing. It's also because he's so thoroughly reported his story. He leads us through complex ideas with an authority that makes the journey pleasurable. His voice, his stance as expert guide, depends on exhaustive reporting. (But there's a paradox: As Pollan writes in his essay, it's deadly to write as The Expert. Be an expert, he says, but write from the perspective of the amateur.)
Voice is also closely related to structure, to the leading of readers from one development to another, be it an idea or a scene, with deliberateness and care. Strong voice is thus central to the sense of unfolding (and vice versa). Unfolding may come through plot and scene or through developments in the argument or exploration of ideas. A sense of revelation and voice takes more work, of course, but they can turn a potentially dry topic into something full of suspense and import.
New to the archive
These stories are also new to the site:
"Jamestown Mystery: A Grave Story" by Diane Tennant for The Virginian-Pilot
"Desperate Parents Chase a Stem Cell Miracle" by Gareth Cook for The Boston Globe
"Untangling the Mystery of the Inca" by Gareth Cook for Wired
"Science's Glacial Strides" by Michelle Nijhuis for The Christian Science Monitor
"Dust and Snow" by Michelle Nijhuis for the High Country News
"Down to a Prayer" by Kawanza Newson and Mark Johnson for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "
February 2, 2007
New narratives
In this issue we've got a bunch of short narratives, good models for telling stories in few words. Three come from the Orange County Register's narrative column, "The Morning Read": "Heart Surgery's Invisible Man" by Tom Berg, "Dark Books See the Light" by Lori Basheda and "That's the Ticket" by Keith Sharon. We've also got a new deadline narrative, a story about a high school protest of the Iraq war: "Peace Signs. Songs. A Flag. A Face-Off. It's Democracy 101." by Rita Savard for The (Lowell, Mass.) Sun.
"Journeying into Jerusalem" provides a first-person view of the Middle East: Tom Dunkel writes for The (Baltimore) Sun about taking a bike tour from Cairo to Jerusalem.
In the really-long-serial department, we've posted "The Crossing" by Kevin Vaughan for the Rocky Mountain News, where it will run until March 1st. With its ambitious scope and close reporting, the 33-chapter piece is clearly notable. The online package includes extensive video and photography.
Looking for science narratives
Our science issue is up next. Please send your science stories and your thoughts about the genre. I'm particularly interested in pieces that get at the increasingly urgent topic of climate change. Magazine narratives on global warming — such as Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent pieces in The New Yorker — are out there; if you can get me a link or permission to post, I'm eager for them. What about newspaper narratives? Radio? Send them along.
January 19, 2007
More new narratives
In this issue we've got several good examples of narratives that flesh out and humanize larger social or medical issues. They use storytelling techniques to educate readers. This is a common way narrative shows up in newspapers.
Then there are the pieces that don't use narrative to some other end; they're simply good stories. In truth, I'm wary of these when it comes to newspapers: Without either some tie to a larger issue or exceptional writing, they can be sentimental, mawkish or lack point. But there are plenty of exceptions. "Two Brothers Make a Family," new to this issue, is poised and graceful and enhanced my appreciation of the human experience — which seems to me a good general standard for narrative-for-its-own-sake.
Two other fine stories are new to the archive: "To Save Someone Else's Son" by Joanne Kenen for Washingtonian magazine chronicles the life and death of a U.S. Senator's son. "Coping When All is Hopeless" by Diana Keough for The Plain Dealer follows the tough job of a doctor who often delivers bad news.
A farewell
Melinda Grenier, who managed the Nieman Web site for five years, is leaving to join Bloomberg News in New York as deputy to the executive editor for political and economics coverage. Melinda helped shepherd the Digest through a long period of design and development, and in the last year she has kept the site running. I've relied on her technical skills, her good sense, good will, patience, feedback and her breadth of technical and editorial talents. She has helped make this site thrive.
I'm grateful to her and wish her all the success and happiness she can stand.
January 5, 2007
Recent narratives
This issue's collection of narratives includes "A Prayer for Father Tim," which was published after we posted our issue on writing about belief. It's a nice example of walking that fine line between ignoring a character's religion and accepting beliefs as fact. Editor Laurie Hertzel writes about this balance in her comments on the piece.
Several of the stories in this issue all build, coincidentally, toward the pointed revelation of information that the writer has been withholding. In "Quarantined," Leah Latimer writes of her mother's time in a TB sanatorium. She saves a fact for the end that adds to the story's poignancy — and readers' sense of outrage.
"Katrina's Nameless Dead" is a remarkable narrative in which Rukmini Callimachi tells the story of two corpses. They are, in a strange way, characters. The piece includes some investigative work to discover the characters' identities. This information, too, is left for the end. In "How One Racehorse Escaped the Slaughterhouse" Todd Frankel also builds toward a revelation of a character's identity. The two stories could hardly be more different; but they share this structural element.
Looking for syllabi
I'm planning a new section of the Digest aimed at instructors and students: a collection of syllabi and reading lists from narrative journalism and literary journalism courses. If you teach, please send your syllabus using the Contact Us button at the top of every page. I also welcome your comments on your experience teaching this craft.
December 15, 2006
Narratives about religious people
"For now, those who knew her content themselves with their own fervent belief that she is with God in heaven."
This line appears toward the end of "Enduring Faith," a series from The Plain Dealer about Dorothy Kazel, a native of Cleveland and a nun who was murdered in El Salvador in 1981.
Years later she had become an icon, a hero and a candidate for sainthood.
It's a line that positions the writer with appropriate narrative distance from his subject; it doesn't buy into the beliefs of a character or characters. It also got me musing about the varied approaches publications take toward religious characters.
The line might have appeared in The New York Times -- a paragon of appropriate narrative distance, generally. But a Times story on Kazel would likely have been an exploration or study of the legend that grows around a person and/or of the way someone reaches sainthood. The Plain Dealer's story, on the other hand, is more emotional; it portrays Kazel as a remarkable woman whose death helped change public opinion, someone others believe to be in heaven, a saint. The difference reflects not just different readers, but the sense papers have of their communities. Kazel was one of The Plain Dealer's own, not someone to be studied. I think there's a place for both sorts of stories — but of course either way I'd want them to be good.
What makes a good religion story?
First of all, religion stories need to be compelling simply as narrative, independent of topics of faith. The thoughts and beliefs a character holds about the world are important, but writing a story about what goes on in his head does not make for strong narrative. A religious character acting on what goes on inside her head, or wrestling with her beliefs as she struggles with a life-changing event -- that sounds more promising. (A religious character wrestling with his death, as in "The Parting" by Barbara Brotman — is also good fodder for engrossing story.)
The pieces I've featured in this issue engage us in the lives of religious people. The writers portray their beliefs in ways that respect their convictions, that recognize the centrality of their beliefs in their make-up as individuals without simply echoing those beliefs.
On narrative stance
Here are basic examples of such echoing: He put his faith in God and She knew that her son was in Heaven now.
How simple, but what a significant change, to rewrite those lines so they're phrased as individual belief, not accepted truth. For example: He says he put his trust in God. She told her friends she knew her son had gone to Heaven.
On the other hand, a story might turn a cold, skeptical eye on a character's beliefs or even disparage them. Sometimes this seems appropriate, as in "A Sermon of Hatred and Doom" by Matt Sedensky. Often a muscular, big-picture approach to belief is useful, as in "Father, Son and Holy Rift" by Christopher Goffard. But it's also possible to be overly skeptical, even hostile. In this case, a writer will not portray a character faithfully, so to speak -- or in three dimensions.
As Peter Manseau writes in his essay for this issue, thoughtful stories about faith could make for a more enlightened world. It seems to me this means bringing open-mindedness and empathy to the work -- but also an allegiance to your readers, in all their diversity, rather than to your characters and their beliefs.
New to the archive
These stories are also new to the site:
Our next issue will be online after the New Year. I hope that the next few weeks are happy ones for you.
December 1, 2006
Recent narratives
In this issue we've got a range of recent stories, all of them great examples of narrative's ability to help us better understand our world -- from demystifying medical studies to humanizing social trends.
These stories are also new to the archive:
Narratives about belief
As I mentioned in my previous note, I'm planning an issue on narratives about religious people and communities. I'll be interested in getting at questions of narrative distance, of how to write respectfully about people's beliefs, help us understand difference better, without portraying characters' convictions as fact. If you have stories that illustrate this issue, or if you have tips, thoughts or questions you'd like to see answered, please get in touch.
Job offering
The literary journalism program at the University of California, Irvine, is looking for a tenure-track assistant professor. The popular program is headed by Barry Siegel, author of several stories and an essay on this site. The program is looking for those who have written (or written about) literary journalism. Applicants should have either an advanced degree or an equivalent publication history. Teaching experience is preferred. Applicants should send a letter of interest and curriculum vitae to Professor Barry Siegel, English Department, HIB 435, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697-2650. (Don't send any unsolicited additional materials or manuscripts.) The deadline is January 1.
November 20, 2006
A thousand people gathered at the Sheraton Boston for three days of talks and readings by Michael Pollan, June Cross, Dan Okrent, Jan Winburn, Roy Peter Clark and many other inspiring speakers. Attendees included many Digest readers and contributors; it was great treat meeting you.
I'm planning an issue called "writing about religious belief" for later this month. If you've got narratives on religious communities or people, please send them my way.
November 13, 2006
Mixed Media
This issue features fine photography and writing by Manny Crisostomo and fine radio storytelling by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. We've also got comments from these two authors on their use of media unfamiliar to them.
It happens that my first jobs in journalism were as a radio reporter and producer. I found it a great education: Writing well for radio means writing sparely and for the ear. I learned that clarity was essential (listeners can't go back and read a sentence over), that extraneous words sap clarity and that concrete, vivid, short words work best. I loved setting scenes with sound.
What didn't suit me was having to check sound levels, hold a microphone, think about batteries running out and so on. I wanted just to observe, listen, smell, perhaps taste — and then write. So I switched to print. But I still love radio and the power of sound to capture scene, convey emotion, tell stories.
For the time being, given our resources, we've been focusing the Digest on newspaper narratives, but I'd like to have more radio on the site. So send radio pieces you like — and, as always, other stories as you see fit.
More good stories
These stories are also new to the site:
2006 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism
I'll be "personing" a Digest table at the conference, eager for visitors. Please stop by; I'm looking forward to meeting you, out there in the living, breathing world.
October 27, 2006
Narratives on Politics
For the sake of convenience I'm calling the stories in this issue "political narratives" — but it'd be more accurate calling them "narratives about politics, policymaking and elections." That's because in a broad sense, most narratives are political: They get at issues of power, influence, status — who has these things and who doesn't.
In honor of the upcoming elections, we're focusing on a more-narrow definition.
I found the pickings for this issue slimmer than if I'd asked for stories about recovery from illness, about crime, about children in trouble. I had to wonder: Why don't we see more political narratives? I asked Jan Winburn of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who edited "The Convictions of Sadie Fields" and who's worked with a slew of prize-winning narrative writers, for some insight.
Jan thinks it's largely an issue of access. "Politicians are all about control," she wrote in an e-mail, "and so they control access. For instance, along with the Sadie Fields piece, we did a profile of Georgia's only openly gay legislator, Rep. Karla Drenner, who was running for re-election on the same ballot as the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. The piece on her was way less revealing — because we had so much difficulty getting her to open up or give us access."
In her comments on writing the Sadie Fields story, Michelle Hiskey describes the great lengths she went to in gaining access to her subject. Michelle's comments include the "pitch letter" she wrote to Fields in an effort to sway her.
Compounding issues of access, papers may be reluctant to devote resources to political narratives because of the breaking-news demands of the politics beat. But read the stories in this issue, and you see that narratives about politics are essential: They can reveal a politico's character, the machinations of policymaking and the crazy turns of election events in ways that standard news reporting cannot.
I'll be eager to receive more political narratives as you do them in the coming weeks. Please send them along.
New book on craft
Roy Peter Clark, esteemed instructor of nonfiction writing, has a new book: "Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer." You can purchase the book through Amazon.com, or if you're coming to the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, you can buy it there.
October 13, 2006
Industry
On September 30, jurors announced the winners of the 2006 Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage, an award that celebrates exceptional works of reporting from around the world. This year's prize included a 2007 Nieman Fellow, Juanita Leon, who won third place for her book about Colombia and its struggles.
We received an e-mail about a new book by Lauren Sandler, former NPR reporter, now an editor at Salon. "Righteous" explores the culture of the American evangelical youth movement. The book jacket portrays it as edgy, muscular and intimate — built on the best narrative techniques. I've ordered it and look forward to reading it soon.
This issue
Our home page features two fine first-person pieces. Amy Ellis Nutt's column about surviving breast cancer is more a personal essay than a real narrative; I include it because it's a great example of finding the right voice for what you want to say. Paul Mauro's "Tipping Point" is a short, pure narrative: With vivid scene, action and dialogue, Mauro shows a character confronting a problem and resolving it.
Children and immigration
We've added "What Will Happen to Kayla?" to our growing collection of immigration stories that focus on children. (See also, for example, "Enrique's Journey" by Sonia Nazario, "A Home for Brissa" by Cindy Lange-Kubick and Anne Hull's "The Weight of a Family's Hopes"). Writing about the children of immigrants is an effective way to get readers to care about thorny, complex issues: Focus on a child, and people care. (For a fine discussion of writing about children, see "Why We Should Care: Writing well about endangered kids" by Barry Siegel.)
Profiles
A trick, it seems to me, in writing a meaningful and entertaining profile (which I'll define as a wide-lens portrait of an individual), is in large part to think "story" not "description." "The Last Best Hope" is a good example of going after story — even if you're writing a general portrait. (Our featured story, "The Growing Season" seems to me more than profile; it's a biography.) For other narrative profiles, search for "profile" in the Digest database.
Next issue
I'd like to include narratives about elections and politics in our next issue. I welcome your submissions.
September 29, 2006
With this issue, I'm glad to add another story to our agriculture category. Like writing about the environment, crafting engaging farming stories can be tough: Tractors, crops and livestock hardly seem like gripping stuff. But Kristy Hebert's lovely story "What's Left Behind" — and the few other farming stories in our archive — show characters struggling with challenges. Farming, of course, has plenty. Hebert's piece explores not only the timeless themes of loss and perseverance but also more particular struggles facing small farmers today.
Suburbia is another beat that isn't often the subject of riveting narrative. But with his occasional series "Homestead to Homes," Bob Shaw of the Pioneer Press has crafted entertaining stories out of unlikely topics. He has pursued character and scene. He's created a sense of narrative progression not only within particular installments but also over the course of the project, which began in October of 2004. We've posted a selection of the more narrative of the stories. (Unfortunately, no link exists to the series as a whole.) For another entertaining suburbia story, see "Mower Power to Him" by Kelley Benham for the St. Petersburg Times.
If you'd like to suggest other good examples of narrative in unexpected places, please send them along.
We've also added a couple of fine new first-person stories to the archive: "One Cop's Story" by Paul Mauro and "Margarethe: A Mother's Day Story in Five Parts." Mauro's story came in after we'd posted our 9/11 issue; it's worth reading any time. Terry Greene Sterling's memoir of her mother is a wonderful model for efficient and poised showing of emotion.
In addition to the stories featured on the home page, these stories are new:
September 18, 2006
9/11 Narratives, Then and Now
This issue includes outstanding stories written in the days following 9/11 as well as a few stories written around this 5th anniversary.
9/11 narratives are, in essence, disaster and rescue stories; they are also reconstructions. (An exception is first-person accounts, such as two from The Wall Street Journal — see links below.) But there are important differences between 9/11 stories and, say, shipwreck, fire and accident pieces. One difference is that 9/11 narratives carry so much subtext: It's a national story, one to which readers have deep emotional, political and personal responses.
Another difference is this: In 9/11 reconstructions, readers know what happens. We don't always know who will live and who will die — but we know that if it's 8:40 a.m. on that ordinary Tuesday morning, unimaginable horrors are very close at hand. For this reason, details that in many pieces would be dull take on great meaning. It is mesmerizing to watch and listen to a man talk to his wife on his cell phone before his plane leaves; this is in large part because we know not just that he will die, but how. The characters and details are ordinary; the event is almost mythic.
It seems to me that the pieces written in the days following 9/11 brought out many reporters' best skills. There's a seriousness to the writing, a clarity of purpose and prose that cataclysmic events often bring out in us.
In general I had a difficult time choosing which pieces to feature on the home page. Be sure to check out these excellent stories as well:
Also new to the archive:
Job opportunity
The University of Iowa's School of Journalism and Mass Communication is hiring a visiting assistant professor of online journalism. Their timeline is short. Here is the job announcement in PDF format.
September 4, 2006
End-of-Summer Narratives, et al
We thought it fitting to end the summer with the Star Tribune's lovely collection of summer stories and Brian Peterson's vivid photo of a boy and his turtle. Overall we've got a record number of new narratives this issue, including a few deadline narratives sent in response to our last issue. I've received still other deadline stories, some of which will get onto the site soon.
As many of you know, Paul Salopek, the author of one of our featured narratives, "A Tank of Gas, a World of Trouble," has been arrested and charged with espionage in Sudan. He'd gone to Sudan to write a piece for National Geographic about the Sahel region. Here's a statement about his arrest from National Geographic and a piece about Salopek in the Chicago Tribune.
In addition to the new narratives on the home page, we've added these:
When you send stories, feel free to include your comments: How you did it, why, what challenges you encountered, even what you would have done differently. Behind-the-scenes accounts add much value to this site.
Happy Labor Day, and keep the stories coming.
August 18, 2006
Deadline Narratives
I enjoyed putting together this issue on deadline narratives — and beefing up our "short features" section. I hope you find the issue useful in your daily reporting. If you're eager, perhaps struggling, to build more storytelling into your work, be sure to read Chip Scanlan's fine essay on deadline narratives. You'll be fortified, emboldened.
It wasn't easy, selecting the stories for the home page. You'll find many more deadline narratives in the short features section of the archive. These stories are new:
July 28, 2006
More New Narratives
I chose the stories in this issue for their range of topic, voice and approach — and because they're all really good. "Offering an Education in Aging" by Tom Dunkel is a lovely portrait of elderly nuns and the researcher who enrolled them in his study on aging. "Brainstorm" by Valeria Godines is a gripping account of bipolar disorder — one that deepened my understanding of mental illness, not least because of its intimate, first-person telling. Alix Christie's piece about a former SS guard in Nazi Germany vividly reconstructs the woman's story. "Facing Famine" by Tom Haines asks readers to make leaps of understanding — and empathy. Finally, Dan Neil's "Before the Rumble Seat" is an engaging and spirited account of his ride in a replica of the first gasoline-powered car.
These articles are also new to the archive:
Next issue we'll look at the theme of writing narratives on deadline. Chip Scanlan of the Poynter Institute will write on the topic. And we'll have fine examples. If you've got one (or several), please send it along.
July 14, 2006
New to the Archive
A few words about our new stories below, but first some follow-up to our last issue on first-person narrative:
Walt Harrington has a new book of first-person journalism called "The Beholder's Eye: A Collection of America's Finest Personal Journalism." The collection includes work by J.R. Moehringer, Mike Sager, Scott Anderson and Harrington himself. Kirkus Reviews writes: "Aims to dispel the old journalistic cliche: that a journalist writing about him/herself is always 'self-indulgent and, quite likely, narcissistic.' ... Not just some of the country's finest personal journalism, but some of its finest journalism, period."
Writers of "investigative memoir" reject the notion that, because memory is flawed, you might as well just make stuff up. They research, revisit, interview — all to the end of offering as accurate an account as possible. Chip Scanlan of the Poynter Institute is a practitioner; so is Walt Harrington. At some point we'll follow up our issue on first person with one focused on investigative memoir. In the meantime, check out these Scanlan columns:
Narratives new to the archive
"The Wrong Man," by Tamara Jones for The Washington Post, is part of an ongoing multimedia project on the Post site called "Being a Black Man." Jones is a veteran narrative writer who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for her story, with Anne Hull, about Iraq war wounded.
We admired "Of Meth and Motherhood" for its combination of strong narrative drive, character development and substance. Stricker holds a doctorate in neuroscience; it seems likely this helps account for Stricker's dispassionate approach to addiction. Her dispassion, in turn, informs the piece's compassionate stance: The series seeks to understand rather than judge.
"Of Meth and Motherhood" comes from the Idaho Falls Post Register. I'd like to get more stories from other small dailies so I can add to their representation on this site. Send them along!
"Chasing Shadows" is a less recent narrative. In 2002 Howard Altman set out to explore the community that surrounds the secretive site of the U.S. "shadow government." The story he wrote is a first-person, reporter-on-the-trail-of-a-story sort of piece. It's a yarn you'd tell around the dinner table — the kind of personal, behind-the-scenes tale that often makes good written narrative.
"Good Intentions" is a recent narrative from Lane DeGregory of the St. Petersburg Times, who sent us the piece in response to our "endangered children" issue. It's a wonderful example of writing well about endangered children: nuanced and consequential.
From the Web site of The Guardian comes an eyewitness account of the murder of photojournalist Martin Adler. This unusual piece resists forcing meaning from the tale. We liked it for its spare and straightforward telling of story, and at the same time, its crafted quality.
These articles are also new to the archive:
June 28, 2006
First-Person Narratives
Use of the first-person runs a range between two poles: stories that use the first person peripherally as a device and stories in which the narrator is a central subject/character.
On one end of the spectrum, the "I" may provide a point of view in a scene, for example, or disclose how a reporter got his information. (See "The Girl" by Kurt Streeter.) But we learn little about the narrator/reporter except that he is present in the story.
On the other end of the spectrum, the narrator is prominent and central. These stories are revealing, often intimate. Done well, they draw us in, make us feel we're in the company of a real and companionable person. All sorts of stories can create this sense of intimacy; in this issue we're focusing on those in which the narrator is a central character.
The narrator as a character
When the narrator figures prominently as "I," the challenge is to develop this character effectively. A writer needs to reveal enough about herself — her character — that readers become engaged in her conflict. She needs to build tension around this conflict and resolve it.
The pitfall is getting lost in your material, all the personal stuff that seems so compelling -- to you. As Adam Hochschild writes in his essay on memoir, the trick is to stay aligned with the reader's perspective, to write about yourself while keeping the reader's entertainment paramount. This isn't easy: It's tough to gain enough detachment from your material to know what's interesting and what's not.
Hochschild offers this tip: "Tell the story to a half-dozen friends and see how they react. What questions do they ask you? Do they draw the same lesson from the experience that you did? . . . If you have already written the story, ask them: Does this work for you? Where do you get bored? Where are you interested?"
I'll add these: Take time away from your story, and try to go back to it as a reader rather than a writer. Read your story aloud. Have someone else read it to you. Do anything that helps you get distance from it.
Your character is central, but you don't matter
It's a paradox: Make yourself a central character — but don't focus on yourself. Tom French handles this paradox gracefully in "The Saboteur and His Son." In the end, we're captivated by the arc of his character, how his character changes. But this is because French builds his tale on a wealth of evocative detail gained through research. He pursues universal themes, and his most obvious characters are people other than himself: his father and his grandparents.
In Hochschild's "Aristocratic Revolutionary," again the central character arc is the narrator's — but the details and action focus on someone else: a dynamic figure in 1960's South Africa. We're fascinated — almost by accident, it seems — by Hochschild's personal story, but of course our fascination is no accident.
Narrator-as-character pieces tend to have at their core a quest on the part of the narrator. Because we read in large part to be in good company, to be taken on a captivating journey by an engaging voice, we're reading to find out how the narrator changes, what she discovers.
Treating oneself as a character is of course more or less contrived. That's just the point: By deliberately seeing yourself as a character, you'll keep your allegiance to readers rather than to your own ego. You'll write a story that captivates with, say, the strength of its detail, its universal themes, its compelling structure. You'll write something people will really want to read.
June 21, 2006
A New Film about Children with Cancer
"A Lion in the House" aired Wednesday, June 21, and Thursday, June 22, on PBS. In a recent article, The New York Times said the film is full of "death, tear-inducing pain and agonizing treatment dilemmas." But the narrative's real focus, the article said, is "the vibrant, vital spirit of children."
June 8, 2006
Endangered Children Narratives
On our home page you'll find a new, wise essay by Barry Siegel on this issue's theme, Stories about Endangered Children. Barry writes about achieving novel and authoritative approaches to this highly emotional subject.
A majority of the stories I read for this site focus in some way on children we worry about. They're sick, abused, lonely, poor.
I first read Barry's piece "A Father's Pain, a Judge's Duty and a Justice Beyond Their Reach" years ago when my first son was three and I was pregnant with my second. Barry writes in his essay that readers "wept mightily" for Gage Wayment, the little boy in the story. I know it's true because I did.
But as Barry points out, he earns this emotional response. His "endangered children" pieces portray not only the immediate emotion of a story but also its social context -- its larger issues. They teach us something about the world we live in. (You'll find all of the stories Barry mentions in his essay in Related Links on the essay's page.)
My boys are still little, which is partly why I still find that my job — reading, selecting and commenting on works of narrative journalism — requires Kleenex. So I ask myself as I'm reading: Does this story make me feel and think? Are the characters authentic, complex? Does the story make me feel in a way that advances my understanding of others and others' difference? I'd like to post narrative that does just that: resists cliche and stereotype.
Certain elements in stories signal to me a lack of depth and complexity: when a story, for example, refers to a character's "storybook life" before the Tragedy happened; when a piece showcases emotion or tragedy or tears, before earning their mention. Titles are clues, too. I'm leery of pieces titled "So-and-so's Story." (The main characters seem always to be women, by the way. Have you ever seen a narrative called "Joe's Story"?)
I'm sure I'm not always successful at culling cliche and mawkishness. Let me know. I'm also eager to hear about your own process in approaching emotional topics. Use the Contact Us button at the top of every page.
May 23, 2006
New Narratives and Essays
This issue we're featuring a collection of recent newspaper narratives and two new essays adapted from talks at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. Our featured narratives range from a very ambitious series about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to a more modest unsolved-crime serial. We also feature a three-part series about conjoined twins and a deadline narrative about a girl's visit to her mother in prison. You'll find links to the stories and essay from the last issue on war-at-home narratives by clicking on "Notable Narratives" or "Essays on Craft & Industry" in the left column of any page and then scrolling down.
Keep sending your recent narratives so I can share them with others around the world.
New documentary film on the war in Iraq
While the last issue was online, I got interested in "The War Tapes," (http://www.thewartapes.com/) a documentary film about the Iraq war to be released in early June. Director Deborah Scranton gave cameras to five soldiers. They filmed their experiences for a year; Scranton made a film from the tapes. I'm looking forward to seeing it. Its publicity promises gritty authenticity, the sort we like to see in narrative journalism — and a sort that's been hard to find in reporting about the war.
Next issue
Next issue we'll look at the challenge of writing well about endangered children. This is a category that includes kids whom readers feel compelled to worry about: ill children, abandoned children, abused children and so on. A large number of the narratives I read for the Digest are about, in some way, endangered kids. The question is, how do you write well about such emotional topics? Barry Siegel, director of the literary journalism program at the University of California, Irvine, will propose an answer.
If you know of, or have written, narratives about children that you'd like us to consider for the next issue of the Digest, please send them along. Use the Contact Us button at the top of each page.
May 7, 2006
The Iraq war at home
Welcome to the second edition of the Nieman Narrative Digest. This is our first themed issue; our featured articles and essays focus on the theme of the Iraq war at home. We've compiled older pieces and more recent ones that explore specific ways the war affects the U.S. and its people — particularly, of course, soldiers and their families.
Besides providing strong examples of stories, I hope to get you thinking about the challenges of covering such a loaded topic. Doug McGill, author of the McGill Report wrote a provocative and thoughtful essay for us on the subject, "War-at-Home Narratives, Their Promise and Failures."
One of the recent narratives featured this week negotiates this challenge, we think, in interesting ways. In "War Without End," two soldiers have returned from Iraq; they've lost their legs to improvised explosive devices or IEDs. The writer, Joan Ryan of the San Francisco Chronicle, follows their recovery with a keen eye; she leaves the men real and resists casting them as archetypal heroes. And yet we found it intriguing that there's also room in the piece to see them as paragons, to fit them into a "patriotic" ideal. "War Without End" is an honest piece about some of the consequences of a terrible war; it's also a more timeless story about overcoming challenges.
Photo-narrative
Congratulations to reporter Jim Sheeler of the Rocky Mountain News who won a Pulitzer Prize for "Final Salute," another of this week's featured narratives. Photographer Todd Heisler won a Pulitzer, too, for the photos that accompanied the story -- pictures that are at times elegant, at times wrenching, always beautifully composed. We'd like to link to more photo-narratives; if you have suggestions, use the Contact Us button at the top of this page.
A teaching newspaper
In industry news, The Anniston Star in Anniston, Ala., will launch its "Teaching Newspaper" in August 2006. Students will earn master's of journalism degrees from the University of Alabama while immersing themselves in the workings of the paper and taking classes from university faculty and Star staff. If you want to learn more, "All Things Considered"
did a May 2, 2006, story on the program.
Enjoy the stories. And let me know what you think. You can e-mail me using the Contact Us button at the top of every page.
April 18, 2006
Welcome to the Nieman Narrative Digest.
This site, and narrative journalism, are rooted in the idea that stories are powerful. It's axiomatic that stories shape our world: They "sell" political candidates; they lead countries to war; they mold families. The narrative arc -- the building of tension and its resolution — holds universal appeal across cultures and generations.
At the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism, we believe that when a story is also factual, when it's held to strict journalistic standards, and when it connects readers with the intimate experiences of others -- their senses, emotions, their particular world view -- through scene, it can be one of the most powerful ways of communicating ideas. That's the kind of journalism we want to support.
Send me your stories
To keep up with what's published, I need your help. My goal is to provide access to a wide range of narratives: long and short, famous and unsung. The best way, perhaps the only way, for me to learn what's out there -- particularly when it comes to those short and unsung pieces — is to hear about them from you.
With this page I also want to share news of the industry: Three stories linked to here were honored by the Pulitzer committee on April 17th: Jim Sheeler won the feature-writing prize for "Final Salute," his piece about a Marine major who notifies families of loved ones killed in Iraq. Dan Barry was a finalist with his stories about New Orleans, which include "Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street." And Mary Schmich was a finalist for her story "The Journey of Judge Joan Lefkow."
Back in February, Random House published Sonia Nazario's book-length version of "Enrique's Journey," her Los Angeles Times series that won a 2003 Pulitzer.
Please use the Contact Us button at the top of this page to alert me to industry news and most importantly, to stories you think are noteworthy -- including your own. (For information on our selection process, see the Narrative Digest FAQ.) I look forward to hearing from you.
I hope this site inspires you to tell intimate, powerful, true stories. Let me know what you think of it. |
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